LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap. Copyright No. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE MORE ABUNDANT 
LIFE 

LENTEN READINGS 



SELECTED CHIEFLY FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS 
OF THE S 

RT. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. 

Late Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts 



ByW. M.L.Jay Uj \^*- ""fy^* 




NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

31 West Twenty-third Street 
1897 



Copyright 
E. P. DUTTON & CO. 

1897 



L 



The Library 
of Congress 

WASHINGTON 






Ube iftnfcfeetbocfte* press, mew HJorft 



PREFACE. 

The observance of Lent as a season of spiritual 
awakening and refreshment, is steadily growing in 
favor with the Christian world. This crowded and 
complex modern life really demands a yearly period 
of comparative quietude, wherein the life of the soul 
— too often thrust aside and starved in the ordinary 
rush of business or pleasure — may come to the front, 
to be fostered and fed, and strengthened for what- 
ever of trial or sorrow it must encounter as its days 
go on. Bishop Phillips Brooks, by largeness of sym- 
pathy and fineness of insight, is well fitted to guide 
us into this quiet, penitential season. No one is less 
open than he to the charge of formalism, yet no one 
has made a more earnest plea for the due observance 
of Lent than that which is chosen for the Ash- 
Wednesday Reading in this book. It is no narrow 
asceticism to which he invites us, but a " more abun- 
dant life," not of the flesh but of the spirit, to be 
lived in loving dependence upon the Saviour, in 
loving commemoration of the suffering and death 



IV PREFACE. 

which He endured in order that all who believe on 
Him might have life. 

The compilation, chiefly from unpublished manu- 
scripts, has been a labor of love. I humbly hope 
that it may help some of us to find or keep the 
" way of life " through earthly Lents to the heavenly 
Easter. 

W. M. L. Jay." 



INDEX TO POETS. 

John Worden ......... 6 

B. M 12, 239 

Margaret E. Sangster ....... 18, 121 

Frances R. Havergal 23, 30, 61, 143,219 

Christina G. Rossetti 36, 213, 243 

Horatius Bonar, D.D 41,71,92 

John G. Whittier 47, 203 

Lucy Larcom ...... 51, 193, 209, 224 

Stuart Sterne 55 

Frederick W. Faber, D.D 67,99 

Eva Stuart 76 

James Russell Lowell 81, 198 

Susan Coolidge ......... 86 

George Herbert . . 104, 170 

Caroline M. Noel ......... 109 

Samuel Longfellow . . . . . . . .113 

Alice Cary 125 

J. L. M. W 130 

Samuel T. Coleridge ........ 136 

Anna L. Waring ......... 148 

W. M. L. Jay . .154 

George Macdonald . . . . . . . .159 

Julia Wood 165 

Louise Mathilde 175 



VI INDEX TO POETS. 

Sarah Doudney 180 

Robert Browning ) 
James Wilson I 

Dora Greenwell . . . . . . . . 189 

Anna E. Hamilton 235 



THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 



Turn ye even unto me, saith the Lord, with all your heart, and 
with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning. And rend your 
heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God ; for 
He is gracious and merciful. — Joel, ii., 12, 13. 

When ye fast be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance. . . . 
That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father, which 
is in secret. — Matt., vi., 16, 18. 

All bodily discipline, all voluntary abstinence 
from pleasure of whatever sort, must be of value 
either as a symbol of something or as a means of 
something. This, then, is the philosophy of fast- 
ing : it expresses repentance, and it uncovers the life 
to God. " Come down, my pride; stand back, my 
passions; for I am wicked, and I wait for God to 
bless me" ; that is what the fasting man says. You 
see what I mean by fasting. It is the voluntary 
disuse of anything innocent in itself, with a view to 



2 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

spiritual culture. It does not apply to food alone. 
It applies to everything which a man may desire. 

Let us think first about the value of fasting as a 
symbol. It is the characteristic of a symbolic action 
that it increases and nourishes the feeling to which 
it corresponds. Laughter is the symbol of joy, but 
as you laugh your laughter reacts upon the joy and 
heightens it. Tears are the sign of sorrow, but they 
feed the sorrow out of which they flow. . . . 
And so it is no artificial thing, nothing unreal or 
unnatural, when the soul, sorry for its sins, ashamed 
of its poor bad life, lets its shame utter itself in signs 
of humiliation, and finds in quick and sure reaction 
the shame which it expresses deepened and strength- 
ened through the utterance which expresses it. . . . 

Then let us pass to the second value of fasting, its 
value directly as a means. The more we watch the 
lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons 
why men are not occupied with great thoughts 
and interests is the way in which their lives are 
over-filled with little things. It is not that you 
despise the highest hopes and interests of your im- 
mortal nature that you neglect them so ; it is mainly 
that your passions crowd so thick about you that 
you are entirely occupied with them. It is no 
untrue picture of the lives of many of us if we imag- 



ASH-WEDNESDAY. 3 

ine ourselves, that is, our wills, standing in the cen- 
tre ; and close about each central figure, about each 
man's self, a crowd of clamorous passions and eager 
lusts; while away outside of them there wait, in 
larger circle, the higher claimants of our time and 
powers — culture and truth and charity and religion, 
with all their train. . . . The man sometimes 
puts out his hand, parts and pushes aside this clam- 
orous crowd, these physical appetites, these secular 
ambitions. He says to them, " Stand back; and, 
at least for a few moments, let me hear what culture 
and truth and charity and religion have to say to my 
soul." Then up through the emptiness that he has 
made by pushing these clamorers back, there pours 
the rich company of higher thoughts and interests, 
and they gather for a time around the soul which 
belongs to them, but from which they have been 
shut away. . . . There is no nobler sight any- 
where than to behold a man thus quietly and reso- 
lutely put aside the lower that the higher may come 
in to him. 

Every now and then a conscience, among the men 
and women who live easy, thoughtless lives, is 
stirred, and someone looks up anxiously, and says, 
" Is this wrong ? Is it wicked to do this ? " And 
when they get their answer, " No, certainly not 



4 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

wicked," then they go back, and give their whole 
lives up to doing their innocent little piece of use- 
lessness again. Ah ! the question is not whether 
that is wicked, whether God will punish you for 
doing that; the question is whether that thing is 
keeping other and better things away from you ; 
whether behind its little bulk the vast privilege and 
dignity of duty is hid from you ; whether it stands 
between God and your soul. If it does, then it is 
an offence to you, and though it be your right hand 
or your right eye, cut it off, pluck it out, and cast it 
from you. To put aside everything that hinders 
the highest from coming to us, and then to call to 
us that highest which — nay, Who is always waiting 
to come, — fasting and prayer, — this, as the habit 
and tenor of a life, is noble. As an occasional effort 
even, if it is real and earnest, it makes the soul freer 
for the future. A short special communion with 
the unseen and eternal prevents the soul from ever 
being again so completely the slave of the things of 
sense and time. 

- What, then, is Lent ? Ah, if our souls are sinful 
and are shut too close by many worldlinesses against 
that Lord who is their Life and their Saviour, what 
do we need ? Let us have the symbols which belong 
to sin and to repentance. Let us, at least for a few 



ASH-WEDNESDAY. 5 

weeks among the many weeks of life, proclaim by 
soberness and quietude of life that we know our 
responsibility, and how often we have been false to 
it. Let us not sweep through the whole year in 
buoyant exultation, as if there were no shame upon 
us, nothing to repent of, nothing for us to fear. By 
some small symbols let us bear witness that we 
know something of the solemnity of living, the 
dreadfulness of sin, the struggle of repentance. Our 
symbols may be very feeble ; our sackcloth may be 
lined with silk and our ashes scented with the juice 
of roses ; but let us do something that shall break the 
mere monotony of complacent living, which seems 
to be forever saying over to itself that there is no 
such thing as sin, that to live is light and easy work. 
Perhaps the symbol may strike in and deepen the 
solemnity which it expresses. Perhaps as we tell 
God of what little sorrow for our sins we have, our 
sorrow for our sins may be increased ; and while we 
stand there in P T :s presence the fasting may gather 
a truer reality of repentance behind it. 

And let those symbols be likewise the means of 
opening our souls to Christ. For a few weeks let 
those obtrusive worldlinesses which block the doors 
of our hearts stand back; and let the way be clear, 
that He who longs to enter in and help us may come 



6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

and meet no obstacle. This is our Lenten task. 

If any man will hear My voice and open unto Me, 
I will come in and sup with him," says Jesus. To 
still the clatter and tumult a little, so that we may 
hear His voice, and to open the door by prayer — 
that is the privilege and duty of these coming 
weeks. 

May God be with us during this Lent ! May 
we be with God ! May there be much of the 
fasting which our Father loves, much penitence for 
sin, and much opening of long-shut doors to Christ ! 
O my dear friends, let us enter into it with earnest- 
ness, that we may come out of it with joy ! 

Whoso the Holy Place would enter in 

Must pray and fast : must pray for steadfast grace 
To turn from all that hides the Father's face ; 

Must fast from every sweet that tends to sin. 

O God, whose blessed Son became obedient to the law for man, 
and underwent hunger and thirst in doing Thy will and fulfilling all 
righteousness, give me grace in all patience and temperance so to 
bear and forbear, that my flesh being subdued to the spirit, I may 
ever obey Thy holy guidance and control, in all righteousness, purity 
and soberness ; Who art our Father and our King, world without 
end. Amen. 



Gbursbap after Hsb^Webnesba^ 

Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save ; 
neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear : but your iniquities have 
separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His 
face from you. — Is., lix., I, 2. 

If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. — Ps., 
lxvi., 18. 

The belief that God will hear our petitions and 
confidences lies deeper in our souls than we imag- 
ine. . . . And so we want to know when it is 
that God will not hear. The hindrance must be in 
the man — that we are sure of. . . . It is not 
anything in God. Here is the great love of the 
Father. Here is the Heart that broods over His 
children with unutterable love. How alert that 
divine ear is to listen, none of us can know. It 
does not need a formal prayer ; the most stumbling 
and broken cry — a sigh, a whisper, anything that 
tells the heart's loneliness and need and penitence 
— can find its way to Him. It cannot possibly 
escape Him, any more than the humblest flower, 
7 



8 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

lying close to the ground, can escape the all-seeking, 
all-finding mercy of the sunlight. Nay, not so 
much as a whisper nor a sigh is needed. A 
thought, a wish, He hears it ; a longing to be bet- 
ter, a longing to be free, the feeblest flutter of a 
soul's love, His soul discovers. His ear is never 
heavy, that it cannot hear. If any of us seem to 
cry and not be heard, the fault is in our cry, and 
not in Him : let us believe that always, O my 
friends ! 

But still, " If I regard iniquity in my heart, the 
Lord will not hear me." What strikes us in the 
condition which David describes is its deliberate- 
ness. It is not something into which a man may 
fall, out of weakness, and almost without knowing 
it. To " regard iniquity is a voluntary act. . . . 
The man or woman chooses the sin, and chooses to 
cling to it. The deliberateness may cloak itself and 
try to pass for a necessity. You may lay the blame 
on circumstance, on temperament, on education, on 
almost anything; but all the time down at the bot- 
tom of your heart, in the moment when you are 
sincerely honest, you know which are the sins you 
choose, which are the sins to which you open the 
gate. You can tell them by a certain confidence in 
their step as they enter and walk through the streets 



THURSDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. 9 

of your heart; they are different from those that 
have climbed in over the unguarded wall. 

There is indeed something in the most obstinate 
and wilful soul that God can hear. There is no man 
so far from God, so utterly indifferent, that God 
does not hear the appeal of his indifference itself 
calling out to Him for pity and awakening. But 
this is not the true communion of the soul with 
God. That communion is broken by a man's delib- 
erate choice and preference of sin, as it is not by his 
feebleness and passionate yielding to temptation. 
. . . In the one case, you have the feeble soul — 
wofully feeble — falling headlong into sin, and yet 
hating its sin and crying out for escape; and in the 
other, the steady, deliberate transgressor looking 
sin in the face and choosing it — deliberately wicked, 
regarding iniquity in his heart. That makes the 
difference. Therefore it is that Jesus stoops and 
gathers up the Magdalen's wretched life, that He 
draws the publican into His spiritual life and makes 
an Apostle of him, that he chooses St. Peter for His 
most trusted servant, and that He sweeps Sadducees 
and Pharisees indignantly away. 

We are God's children. We are made for God. 
Between His nature and our nature there is an 
essential, everlasting union. He will enter into 



IO THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

communion with any soul that will receive Him. 
Only sin has the power to break the sympathy 
between the child and the Father, and send a sor- 
row to the Father's heart, a sorrow as of bereave- 
ment of His best-beloved, and to send the child out 
into the desolateness of an orphaned life. 

Do you not know what I am trying to describe so 
feebly ? Have you never felt sure that sin was 
harming you not merely by what it made you do, 
but by what it made you lose ? There was a life 
with God, of which men told, of which something 
in your own heart assured you of the possibility and 
the beauty, from which you knew you were shut 
out, not because of any unwillingness of God, but 
simply because of the life you were living. 

Years and years ago the whole story was told by 
Jesus in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He 
never was turned out of his father's house. A 
thousand slips and faults of his boyhood did not 
separate him from his father so long as his heart was 
true and loyal. Only when he rebelled and went 
away, his father could not follow him, except with 
love. Only as long as he stayed away, his father, 
however much he loved him, could not be with him. 
But the moment he returned, the house was opened, 
the feast was spread, the communion was reestab- 



THURSDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. II 

lished. " While he was yet a great way off, his 
father saw him." There is no more to tell than 
that. A thousand sermons, a thousand Lents, 
could tell no more. God will hear as soon as He 
can hear. It is man's obstinacy, not God's reluc- 
tance, that keeps back the mercy. 

There are two certainties which come from all of 
this. They are the truths you need for Lent. 
First : if you are not .wilful, God will hear you. It 
is deliberate sin, a sin that hugs itself and is not 
willing to give itself up, that shuts the door of spir- 
itual life, and hides the Saviour from the soul. If 
you are sure (and of this much you may be sure) 
that this is not in you, if you are sure that, weak as 
you are, you still do not love your sin, but hate it, 
you do not cling to it but long to get away from it ; 
then you may look up with the fullest confidence to 
a hearing God. Second : that if whatever difficulty 
lies between our souls and God comes out of our 
wills, then it is in the power of those wills to break 
through the difficulty and find God where He 
waits behind it. If we can seek death, we can also 
seek life. There is no man so bad but the same 
power of self-will that chose his badness might also 
have chosen goodness, — nay, may choose it still. 
The gate stands open wide. Repentance certainly 



12 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

will find forgiveness. A turning to God will 
surely find Him waiting. " Every one that asketh 
receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him 
that knocketh it shall be opened." Let us pray : 
" So give now unto us who ask; let us who seek, 
find; open the gate to us who knock." 

Thus day and night they are pressing nigh, 
With tears and sighs, to the heavenly Gate, 

Where the Watchman stands in His majesty, 

With a patience that never has said, " Too late." 

Let the sorrowful children of want and sin 
Draw near to the Gate, whence none depart ; 

Let the nations arise and enter in, 

For the Lord is willing, with all His heart. 

Lord Jesus, Who earnest from heaven to earth to call us, wean us 
from earth that we may ascend to Thee in heaven. Thou leftest 
heaven for love of us : forbid it that we should not leave anything 
or everything for love of Thee. Thou sinless earnest into contact 
with sin for us ; enable us for love of Thee to repent and sin no 
more. Amen. 



ffribap after HsMKttebnesba^ 

And He said unto them, "Have ye not heard what David did 
when he was an-hungred ; . how he entered into the house 

of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to 
eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? " 
— Matt., xii., 3, 4. 

A THOUSAND years, and more, had passed after 
the bright morning when David came up to the 
Temple-gate at Nob, and Jesus Christ found use for 
the old story to illustrate what He wanted His dis- 
ciples to understand in their bewilderment. They 
had taken the ears of corn out of the cornfield on 
the Sabbath day, which were to the ears of corn 
which rustled carelessly in the wind on other days 
of the week what the loaves of shew-bread were to 
the loaves sold by the bakers in the shops, and 
Jesus justified them ; He reached back into the 
past, and justified David a thousand years before. 
He at least would have nothing too sacred for its 
use. To Him at least the more sacred anything 
was, the more fit and ready should it be to minister 
13 



14 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

to man's most common need. ... It was for 
the honor of the shew-bread that David insisted 
that it should not fail of its purpose, and lie useless 
on its golden table while a man was standing hungry 
at the door. It was for the honor of the Sabbath 
that Jesus rebuked that false care for its dignity 
which would not rob the wheat-stalks on this one 
day of the purpose of their life. 

It is the portion and duty of every man who 
knows himself to be the child of God to claim the 
highest and divinest of his Father's helps for all his 
most immediate and ordinary needs. What a great 
thing life would become if we did that ! . . . 
You get discouraged. The task of the hour seems 
too heavy. That awful blight of sordidness falls on 
everything, and makes nothing seem worth while. 
The whole degenerates into a terrible machine. 
The dust and clatter fill the air with tumult and 
oppression. And men pity you. They see the 
weariness and sadness in your face; they try to 
cheer you up ; they offer you distractions. They 
dole out to you bits of philosophy. . . . And 
all the time there lies the shew-bread, — there on its 
golden table lies the sacred food which we think we 
must not touch for common wants like these ! 
There are the truths which we believe were made to 



FRIDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. 1$ 

feed, like precious fragrant oils, the flames of the 
most ecstatic ambitions and the great attempts of 
inspired sanity, the supreme efforts of the supremest 
moments of men's lives. They are the truths that 
we are all of us God's children; that every soul is 
made for purity and has no right to sin ; that no 
soul can do its duty anywhere without a thrill of 
richer life running through all the world. These 
are the shew-bread truths. What have our poor 
depressions and discouragements and cowardices and 
failures, our little tasks and commonplace existences 
to do with truths like these ! We may starve, but 
we must not touch the shew-bread ; it is not lawful 
for us, but only for the priests ! 

my dear friends, when, with an instinct as true 
as David's, we can let our souls say, " We have a 
right, the least need of the least child of God has 
a right to the very sacredest and highest of his 
Father's truth ; my little tasks, the little tasks 
even of my little life, claim the divinest inspirations 
which the martyrdoms and the crusades of the most 
splendid souls require," — the moment we are bold 
enough for that, the shew-bread almost leaps from 
the table to our hungry life, and the true Priest of 
God, Christ Himself, presses it into our hands. 

1 call Christ the Priest, and so He is, but He is 



l6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

also the very Shew-bread of Humanity Himself. 
And has not the wonder of His offered presence in 
the world been this, — that He has wakened the 
David-instinct in countless souls ? He has made 
common men feel that their common hunger gave 
them a true claim on Him, a claim which He would 
own. No Christ for priests and heroes only has He 
been, but rather a Christ who made a possible hero 
or priest of every man ; and taught the world that 
no struggle after righteousness was so obscure, and 
no search after truth was so blind and stumbling, 
that it might not call on the Eternal Righteousness 
and the Eternal Truth, and be sure that they would 
hear the cry. All hunger knows its right to the 
Bread of Life. . . . 

There are the higher and the lower realms of life ; 
— alas for us if we deny the difference between the 
hunger of the body and the hunger of the soul, and 
let ourselves think, or teach others to think, that 
the messages and impartations of God which come 
through the one have the same richness and blessed- 
ness with those which come through the other. 
But, notwithstanding this is so, — nay, all the more 
because it is so, — we need to recognize and say that 
the lower life is God's, and that He cares for it, 
and that He uses it as truly as the higher. . . , 



FRIDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. 1J 

When you come down from the summits, you do 
not come away from God. There is no task of life 
in which you do not need Him. The Nation is as 
truly His as the Church. The work-bench needs 
His light as truly as the cloister. . . . The 
temples will not be less but more sacred when the 
sacredness of the shop and field are cordially and 
thankfully acknowledged. The shew-bread will be 
more holy when it has proved that it is not too 
holy to feed the hunger of a hungry man. The 
highest reaches of religious speculation and religious 
rapture will reach higher still when religion has been 
claimed by the commonest duties and the most sor- 
did sufferings of life as their only strength and help. 
What is the issue of it all for us ? God hasten 
the day when the world shall freely use the divinest 
powers for its commonest tasks ! When that day 
comes, the Millennium is here. The world waits 
for that day. But we need not wait. For each of 
us that day may come now. Do not delay until 
some need worthy of God shall seem to make it 
possible for you to come to Him ! All needs need 
Him. Come with the needs you have. Let them 
claim Him. Through His supply of them He will 
awaken higher needs ; and so, at last, little by little, 
He will fulfil you with Himself. 



1 8 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

The little sharp vexations, 

And the briars that catch and fret, 
Why not take all to the Helper 

Who has never failed us yet ? 
Tell Him about the heartaches, 

And tell Him the longings, too ; 
Tell Him the baffled purpose, 

When we scarce know what to do. 
Then, leaving all our weakness 

With the One divinely strong, 
Forget that we bore the burden, 

And carry away the song. 

O Lord our only Saviour, we cannot bear any burden worthily 
without Thee ; upbear us under them all. We look without seeing 
unless Thou purge our sight ; grant us sight. Nothing can we do 
unless Thou prosper us ; oh, prosper Thou our handiwork. We are 
weak ; out of weakness make us strong. We believe ; help Thou 
our unbelief. We hope ; let us not be disappointed of our hope. 
We love ; grant us to love much, to love all, and most of all to love 
Thee. For Thy Name's sake. Amen. 



Saturba^ after Hsb^Weimee&a^ 

A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth 
good things ; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth 
evil things. — Matt., xii., 35. 

For whosoever hath to him shall be given ; but whosoever hath not, 
from him shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have. — 
Luke, viii., 18. 

The idea that, out of the mass of influences 
about us the good character appropriates the ele- 
ments which belong to it so that it becomes even 
better, and the bad character appropriates its own 
elements and becomes even worse, — that seems to 
me to be one of the most profoundly impressive 
declarations of what essentially different things the 
good and evil are. I take two seeds which look so 
much alike that only the skilled eye can tell the 
difference between ; I plant them side by side in the 
same soil ; immediately each of them sends out its 
summons ; each demands of the ground the elements 
of growth which its peculiar nature craves. The 
earth hears and acknowledges the summons, and 
19 



20 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

renders up to each what it demands. So two men 
who seem just alike are set down in the same city; 
instantly to one there fly all the influences of good, 
to the other there gather all the powers of evil, that 
pervade that city's life. Or into a man's life is 
dropped a purpose ; that purpose instantly declares 
its character by the way in which it divides the 
forces of his life. If it is good, it calls all that is 
good within him or around him to its aid. All that 
is noble gives its strength willingly to this new, 
feeble plan ; all that is sluggish, base, selfish, in his 
nature or his circumstances, sets itself against his 
desire. It is in such discriminations that the essen- 
tial differences of the qualities of the good and bad 
display themselves. In the least atom of good there 
lies a power to attract goodness and repel wicked- 
ness. In the least atom of wickedness there lies a 
power to repel the good and attract the bad. That 
is the qualitative power of moral natures. Ah, 
when we think how everywhere we are imposed 
upon by quantity, do we not need, do we not wel- 
come, this strong statement that the real power of 
things lies in their qualities, in what they really are 
whether there be much of them or little ? 

We need to learn, when we hear Christ insisting 
on repentance, on love for Himself, on love for 



SATURDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. 21 

fellow-man, on devoted work, that His desire is, 
first of all and deepest of all, for the qualities of 
those things. He wants a real repentance, a real 
love, a real devotion. If He sees reality, we can 
well understand how He can be infinitely patient 
with littleness. For where He stands eternity is 
all in sight; He sees forever; He knows through 
what summer of cloudless sunshine the least grace 
will have time to ripen to the richest. He knows 
in what rich fields the seed will find eternal lodg- 
ment. So there is time enough, if only the seed is 
real. If it is not real, eternity is not long enough 
nor heaven rich enough to bring it to anything. 

How impressive this is in the story of Christ's 
earthly life ! How patient He was with imperfec- 
tion ! How intolerant of unreality ! He could 
wait for a publican while he unsnarled himself out 
of the meshes of his low vocation, but He cut with 
a word like a sword through the solemn trifling of 
the Pharisees. He never was impatient with His 
disciples. Their graces were very small, but they 
were real. Eternity was long, and He could wait 
till the graces which He saw to be real opened into 
all the possibility which He discerned in them, till 
the Peter who paraded his genuine but feeble reso- 
lution of devotion at the Supper grew to be the 



22 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Peter who could die for Him at Rome, and live with 
Him in some high doing of His will in heaven. 

It is good for us if we can treat ourselves as our 
Lord treats us. Try to find out if your repentance 
for sin is real — a genuine sorrow for a wrong life. 
If it is, no matter if it falls short of the complete 
contrition which you picture to yourself, still keep 
it, hold it fast ; do not let it slip away and drop back 
into the placid content which you felt before you 
were penitent at all. So with your love to your 
Saviour ; do not throw it away because it is not that 
large-winged devotion which soars up into the very 
sunshine of His closest Company. Keep it. Feed 
it on all you know of Him. Never trifle with it, or 
surround it with any unreality of profession, merely 
to try to make it seem larger than it is. Reverence 
it, not because it is great enough to be worthy of 
Him, but because for such a being as you are to 
love such a Being as He is at all, is a sublime act — 
the glorification of your nature and the promise of 
infinite growth. 

In the truth which Jesus taught, then, in the 
proverb which was so often on His lips, there still 
lies the warning and the inspiration that He put 
there. It is the truth of a live world, a world so 
full of life that into it nothing can fall without par- 



SATURDAY AFTER ASH-WEDNESDAY. 23 

taking of its life, — a world that makes the good 
better and the bad worse always. 

If the world is making us worse, then not to 
change the world but to be changed ourselves is 
what we need. We must be regenerate by Christ, 
and then the world shall become His school-room, 
by all its ministries bringing us more and more per- 
fectly to Him. May He give us His new life, that 
the world may become new to us ! 

Unto him that hath Thou givest 

Ever more abundantly. 
Lord, I live because Thou livest, 

Therefore give new life to me ; 
Therefore speed me in the race ; 
Therefore let me grow in grace. 

Let me grow by sun and shower, 

Every moment water me ; 
Make me really hour by hour 

More and more conformed to Thee, 
That Thy loving eye may trace, 
Day by day, my growth in grace. 

Let me then be always growing, 

Never, never standing still ; 
Listening, learning, better knowing 

Thee and Thy most gracious will. 
Till I reach Thy Holy Place, 
Daily let me grow in grace. 



24 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

O Gracious God, Who maketh all things to work together for the 
good of them that love Thee, grant me such love to Thee that I may 
find the good in all Thy gifts and creatures, and use all to Thy 
glory ; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



fivst Sunbai? in Xent 

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness, to be 
tempted of the devil. — Matt., iv., i. 

For we have not an High Priest who cannot be touched with the 
feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we 
are. — Heb., iv., 15. 

No adoption of any strict rule of life, no separa- 
tion of ourselves from a certain region of dangerous 
occupations, sets us free from the persecution of 
temptation. We are tempted to sin everywhere. 
It is pathetic, almost terrible, to think how long 
this has been going on. Through all these weary 
years which it tires us to think of, they have been 
so many ; through all these monotonous generations 
that we hear flowing on endlessly through the cav- 
ernous depths of history, as one listens to a stream 
dropping down monotonously forever underground ; 
through all the years and generations of human life, 
men have been tempted, — not one that ever lived 
did not meet this persistent, intrusive enticement to 
sin. 

25 



26 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

And now, what effect has this temptation of our 
Lord upon this strange, universal experience of 
men ? The man who has seen Christ will not be 
found explaining temptation away. He will not 
delude himself with vain hopes of living a smooth, 
untempted life. He will read in the temptation of 
the Perfect Life that that is impossible forever for 
any man. When he is depressed and hungry and 
exhausted, he will look for the devil as his Lord 
did ; and when he sees him coming, when he hears 
his words and feels the desire of sin stirring in his 
heart, he will not say, " Oh, this is nothing but one 
stage of my growth ! ' ' — he will recognize the old 
enemy of his Master coming for the old battle, and 
pray for his Master's strength in the hour of terrible, 
inevitable struggle. 

But . . . shall men go on courting tempta- 
tions, finding them out, and running into them, so 
that they may come out glorious and strong ? 
Look at Christ's temptation. There is one phrase 
that lights up the whole story, — Christ was " led up 
of the Spirit to be tempted of the devil." He had 
a certain work to do. That work was not His own, 
but was His Father's. His Father's Spirit guided 
Him, and told Him how to do it. For some reason 
(who but that Spirit can say wholly what ?) it was 



FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT. 2? 

necessary that He should meet the devil in the wil- 
derness. Therefore the Spirit led Him there, and, 
filled with the Spirit all the time that He was there, 
He came down safe and glorious. We too have a 
work, a duty. Our Father gives it to us as His 
Father gave His to Jesus. In doing our duty the 
Spirit of our Father may often lead us into tempta- 
tion, but if He really leads us there He will protect 
us there. If He does not lead us, if we go of our 
own self-will, we have no pledge of His protection. 
We leave at the door the Guide whose company is 
safety. 

The first temptation is told thus : "And when the 
tempter came to Him, he said, If Thou be the Son 
of God, command that these stones be made bread. 
But He answered and said, It is written, Man shall 
not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro- 
ceedeth out of the mouth of God." . . . And 
there was the hunger gnawing all the while and say- 
ing " Amen " to the devil's words. 

Do you not see what the temptation was and 
what it is forever ? O my dear friend, God made 
these things, and made you to live by them, but not 
by them alone. Go on ; gather the joy out of the 
earth and sky, out of the bread He gives you power 
to win, out of the water that He made to gush at 



28 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

your feet ; only, when the time comes — as it is sure 
to come some time, as perhaps it is to come now — 
when, in order to speak some word out of His 
mouth to you, some word of duty or chanty or hoYu 
ness, He takes these things away, and you are 
tempted to shut your ears to His word in order that 
you may keep these pleasant things, — then you are 
just where Jesus was — the devil is at your ear. 
May God help you to see just what Jesus saw — 
what He said afterward, perhaps remembering His 
own temptation: " The life is more than meat." 
May he help you to say, " No ! Nothing — not even 
His gifts — shall blind or deafen me to Him. Man 
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word out 
of the mouth of God " — the blessed sacrifice of 
sense to spirit. 

Do we know anything about [the second] tempta- 
tion ? . . . If ever, in any way, the thought 
of spiritual privilege has tried to draw us away from 
the everlasting, central thought of duty, the abso- 
lute necessity of faithfulness and watchfulness; if 
ever, in order to realize God more completely, you 
have been tempted to go out of the path of simple 
duty where He has set you, — it has been Christ's 
temptation over again. 

And was it [the third] a temptation ? Did Jesus 



FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT. 29 

want those kingdoms and their glory ? Surely He 
did. He had come to win them, He had come to 
purchase them with His own precious blood. He 
stood with His heart full of blessings and the world 
would not take them. He wanted that world that 
He might pour His blessings in and upon it. . . . 
If you have ever had a friend whom with the purest 
sympathy and love you longed to bless and help, 
who shut himself against you ; and if the time has 
come when you have seen, or thought you have 
seen, just how, by one wrong act, by one concession 
to his standards, by one compliance, you could get 
the access to him that you wanted ; if then all your 
love for him has poured in its influence to make you 
do that wrong thing, then you know of what sort 
this last temptation was. How it touched Jesus to 
the quick we can see in the intensity of the indigna- 
tion with which He turned against it. " Get thee 
hence, Satan!" He cries out. This temptation had 
come nearer to His heart than any of the others. 

There will come a world where there will be no 
temptation — a garden with no serpent, a city with 
no sin. The harvest day will come and the wheat 
will be gathered safe into the Master's barn. It will 
be very sweet and glorious. Our tired hearts rest 
on the promises with peaceful delight. But that 



30 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

time is not yet. Here are our tempted lives; and 
here, right in the midst of us, stands our tempted 
Saviour. If we are men, we shall meet temptation 
as He met it, in the strength of the God who is the 
Father, of whom all men are children. Every temp- 
tation that attacks us attacked Him and was con- 
quered. We are fighting a defeated enemy. We 
are struggling for a victory which is already won. 
That may be our strength and assurance as we 
recall, whenever our struggle becomes hottest and 
most trying, the wonderful and blessed day when 
Jesus was " led up of the Spirit into the wilderness 
to be tempted of the devil." 

Distrust thyself, but trust His strength, 

In Him thou shalt be strong ; 
His weakest ones may learn at length 

A daily triumph-song. 
Distrust thyself, but trust alone 

In Him, for all, for ever ! 
And joyously thy heart shall own 

That Jesus faileth never. 

O God, Who has set us our work to do in life, give us grace to do 
it in and for Thee. Grant that no temptation of this present evil 
world may lead us to forget that Thee, and Thee only, we must 
serve in all things ; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



flDonbap after tbe first Sunfcap, 

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it 
more abundantly. — John, x., io. 

Among all the words of Jesus, I do not know 
where we shall find larger words than these. They 
are very primitive and fundamental. They go back 
to the very beginning and purpose of His presence 
on the earth. " What art Thou here for, O won- 
derful, mysterious, bewildering Christ ? " "I am 
here that men may have life more and more abun- 
dantly. ' ' Could words go farther back than that ? 
Behind all special things which He wanted men to 
do and be, behind all the great lessons which He 
wanted men to learn, He wanted men, first of all, 
to live. . . . It is deficient vitality, not exces- 
sive vitality, which makes the mischief and trouble 
of the world. . . . Do we not know that there 
are certain persons in the world whose recognizable 
purpose and office it is to increase the amount of 
this vitality of life in the regions where they have 
31 



32 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

been set ? In every circle or community where 
you have ever lived has there not been some man 
whom you knew as a life-giver ? He may or may 
not have been a learned man who gave definite 
instruction, but he increased vitality. He caused 
men to do their best. He quickened languid 
natures. He made the streams run full. He called 
the dead to life. Such men are everywhere. That 
which makes them memorable is that beside or 
through their special faculty, they have this uni- 
versal, elemental power, — they create condition in 
other men. You can say nothing more of such a 
man than this — he is the life-giver. He comes and 
things have life. 

When we have realized such a man as that, and 
seen just what he is in the great world, we have 
come where we can understand Christ and see just 
what was the meaning of His self-description. 
Sometimes people count up Christ's acts and stand 
with the little group of jewels in their open hands, 
looking at them with something like puzzled won- 
der, and saying, " Is this, then, all that He did ?" 
Other people gather Christ's words together, and 
feel through all their beauty a bewildering sense 
that they do not fully account for the marvellous 
power of His life. But sometimes there comes a 



MONDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 33 

truer apprehension. The things He did, the things 
He said, were only signs and indications of what He 
was. He was not primarily the Deed-Doer or the 
Word-Sayer; He was the Life-Giver. He made 
men live. Wherever He went He brought vitality. 
Both in the days of His incarnation and in the long 
years of His power which have followed since He 
vanished from men's sight, His work has been to 
create the conditions in which all sorts of men 
should live. He hated death. He hates death 
everywhere. He took men in Jerusalem and poured 
in behind their torpid faculties the fiery vitality 
that stung them all to life. This was His redemp- 
tion of mankind. Whatever else came from His 
words and actions, everywhere this was true, — men 
lived by Him. " Ye will not come unto me that 
ye might have life," was His cry of keen momen- 
tary disappointment. " He that eateth me the 
same shall live by me," was His consummate defini- 
tion of His power. At the head of all life-givers 
stands the life-giving Son of Man. 

And see how perfectly clear is His conception of 
the way in which He is to give life to men, to com- 
plete the vitality of the world. It is not by stirring 
up the powers of each individual, as if eacli carried 
his vitality lodged within himself, and could live as 



34 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

an independent unit of life. There is a great Reser- 
voir and Source of life with which each being is to 
be brought into contact, into which each being is to 
be bound, so that Its vitality can be poured through 
the channels of the bound, the related, the conse- 
crated, the religious being. This is Christ's splendid 
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. He realized it 
first in Himself. He was the Son of God. His life 
was God's life. What He would do for every man 
was to set that man's nature into the Divine Nature 
so that the Divine Life could live in it. He would 
put the star into the system ; He would put the tree 
into the soil; — nay, His own figure alone tells the 
story, — " No man cometh unto the Father but by 
me." " He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father," — so He is always saying. 

The necessity of life ! — how all the cautious theo- 
ries deny that principle. " Too much life is dan- 
gerous," — so runs the conscious or unconscious 
thought of hosts of frightened men. " Let life be 
limited. You must not think too much; you must 
not act too venturously ; safety lies in the limitation 
of vitality." Against this comes the calm word of 
Jesus. " Nay, live your fullest. The full life is 
the only safe life. Danger comes not by excess, 
but by defect of vitality. But you live fully only 



MONDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 35 

when you live as a part, not as a whole. To try to 
live as a whole is to limit and starve your life. . . . 
Set your mind close to the Eternal Unity of truth, 
and hold it there until the two grow together and 
the truth that is universal and eternal, the truth that 
is God, flows into you, and you live by it." That 
is Christ's urgency of faith which is also hope and 
love. . . . Life is not life, freedom is not free- 
dom, unless the live thing is set in the ground of its 
true nourishment, and keeps open the connection 
with the Eternal Source of its strength. Man is not 
living except as he lives in God. 

Everything best which comes into the world as it 
is now, opens some glimpse of that complete world 
which shall be, ... of the new heavens and 
the new earth which are to be radiant and strong 
with the vitality which is by obedience ; where peace 
and power and growth shall know no disturbance 
and no hindrance. What is it but the sight which 
the Apostle saw ? — the great city, the holy Jerusa- 
lem, descending out of heaven from God, having 
the glory of God: ''And there shall in nowise 
enter into it anything that defileth, neither what- 
soever worketh abomination or maketh a lie ; but 
they which are written in the Lamb's Book of 
Life. ' ' 



36 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

A lovely City in a lovely land, 

Whose citizens are lovely, and whose King 

Is Very Love ; to Whom all angels sing ; 
To Whom all saints sing crowned, their sacred band 
Saluting Love with palm-branch in their hand . . . 
A bower of roses is not half so sweet, 

A cave of diamonds doth not glitter so, 
Nor Lebanon is fruitful set thereby : 
And thither thou, beloved, and thither I 

May set our heart and set our face, and go 
Faint yet pursuing home on tireless feet. 

Glory to God for all His goodness, in all things, and to all men, 
everywhere, and forever. 

Glory to Him from the perfect and unspotted dwellers in heavenly 
light ; glory to Him, in our measure, from us unworthy and humble, 
sitting under their feet. 

Holy, Holy, Holy, unsearchable in eternity, Father of all men, 
and Life-Giver forever. 

O Lord of Life and Love, take hold of us with unseen fingers, till 
we stretch forward all together to life everlasting. Amen. 



Guesbap after the first Sunba^ 

He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. — 
John, xi., 25. 

The life which Christ gives is the awakening and 
inspiring of every part of our nature through the 
power of Christ, made our power by obedient love. 
Love, then, for Him, is the essence of the life He 
gives. " He that believeth on me, though he were 
dead, yet he shall live," — that He promises of this 
life as well as of the next. It is all one with Him. 
And the power of belief is love. What then ? 
Love is of necessity a gradual and growing thing, 
and the love of the Infinite is an infinite thing. If 
the life that Christ gives were something else than 
what it is, it might perhaps be given all in an instant, 
and be at once complete. The fetters are struck off 
of a prisoner's limbs, and with the hammer's blow he 
is completely free. The doors of a banquet cham- 
ber are flung open, and with one burst of light and 
music the guest is entirely welcome. But a trans- 
forming Love, that takes our nature and spreads it 

37 



38 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

through the very substance of another nature — that 
cannot be an instantaneous thing. It may begin in 
an instant, — one look into the face of Jesus and the 
love, at that first sight, may start, and begin to send 
His life into our deadness. But as infinite as what 
He has to give, must be our reception of it. How the 
soul glories in this truth when it has learned it ! It 
is reconciled to its manifest imperfections while it 
yet dares to aspire to absolute perfectness. It finds 
itself all full of sin, and yet dares to call itself a child 
of God. It lies as the pebble lies on the shore, and 
feels in the wave that wets it now only the promise 
and potency of the unmeasured ocean whose murmur" 
it hears stretching back into infinity. The soul 
which knows that it loves Christ hears all Christ's 
nature promising Itself to it just as fast and just as 
fully as it can receive it. It is an endless life. 

The only qualification and limit to this must be 
in man's ability to receive the life of Christ. But 
the wish of Christ to give Himself to man involves 
also the nature of the man to whom He gives Him- 
self. " I am come that they might have life," He 
said. That life was His life; He felt it in Himself, 
felt its infinity. And as He came, He saw the men 
that He was coming to ; He saw all that was base 
about them, saw how superficial and how shallow 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 39 

they were. He saw them filled with sin through 
the love of sin, and yet He said, " I am coming to 
give them Myself through the love of Me, to give 
them Myself deeper and deeper, little by little, until 
they shall have received Me perfectly." Look what 
a faith in the possibilities of human nature the 
Incarnation implied ! Just when man was most bit- 
terly despairing of himself, Christ came with His 
bewildering promise of the divine life for man. Just 
when men seemed to be proving how fertile their 
human nature could be in evil, Christ came and 
claimed that the same fertility might overrun with 
harvests of life instead of harvests of death, — that a 
world which could be bad could also be infinitely 
good. 

The faith of Christ in man — that is what is written 
in the Incarnation ! The faith of Christ in you or 
me — that is what is written in the visit of Christ to 
you or me when, coming and standing directly 
across our path of wickedness and death, He says 
to us calmly and surely, " I am come that you 
might have life, the life of holiness which is by love 
of Me." Christ sees a man in sin, and says, " Every 
power which that man sins with he might be holy 
with. Every faculty he serves the devil with, he 
might serve Me with. With all the richness with 



40 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

which he is wicked he might be good. I will go 
and put Myself into his life, and its vigorous vitality, 
taking hold of Me, a little at first, shall possess Me 
more abundantly till I have transformed it to My- 
self. " Christ's call to a man to be converted is the 
sublimest testimony to the essential capacity of 
human life. And yet men talk as if the great reve- 
lation of the Gospel were how wicked man is, and 
not how good he may become ! The Gospel has 
nothing to do with sin except to forgive it, and to 
find in its luxuriance the promise of what luxuri- 
ant growth goodness might come to in that same 
human nature. The farmer has nothing to do with 
the weeds except to pluck them out and to believe 
that his wheat will grow more richly in ground that 
could make the weeds so rich. When will men set 
their hearts free to believe that Jesus meant exactly 
what He said when He stood in the temple, in His 
Passion Week, and cried, " I came not to judge the 
world, but to save the world ? " 

Not to judge you, but to save you, does Christ 
come now, O my dear friend ! You have heard of 
Him all your life. You have seen Him far away. 
Oh, if to-day He could meet you where you could 
not escape Him, and in the power of His meekness 
compel you to face Him ! You are afraid, for you 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 4 1 

have heard that He is terrible in His hatred of sin ; 
but the first words that He says are, " I am come 
not to judge you, but to save you." And the 
offer of salvation makes you feel your sin far more 
keenly than any threat of punishment could. He 
goes on, " I am come that you might have life " ; 
and under that promise you feel for the first time 
how dead you have been. And yet once more — 
" That you might have it more abundantly " ; and 
then Eternity opens before you with its picture of 
your poor soul made conscious of its vast capacity, 
for ever receiving new depths and riches of its Lord, 
who, to all eternity, shall never weary of bestowing 
Himself upon it. 

He liveth, and we live ! 

His life for us prevails ! 
His fulness fills our mighty void, 

His strength for us avails. 

Life worketh in us now, 

Life is for us in store ; 
So death is swallowed up of life ; 

We live forevermore. 

O my God, who hast no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, 
save me from the death of sin ; and when this life is fulfilled, bring 
me to the life everlasting : Through Jesus Christ our Life, Amen. 



We&nesba? after tbe f irat Sunba^ 

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall 
dreams dreams, your young men shall see visions. — Joel, ii., 28. 

THAT which these three words — prophecy, dream, 
and vision — represent, is felt by every considerate 
and large-minded man to be a true and necessary 
element of life. We may call it spirituality, enthu- 
siasm, spontaneity, outlook, insight, — many names 
will do, — but what we mean by all of them is essen- 
tially the same. It is the power to see the element 
of eternal principles in which things live, — to see the 
way in which each fact and act is a true wave on 
the great ocean of infinity, to see all life full of the 
life of God, — and so to lose the sense of hardness 
and mechanicalness and separateness in the things 
which happen and the things we do. We know how 
difficult that is ; we know how even the things which 
seem to be by very nature spiritual, and so least 
capable of such degeneration, become mechanical. 
Worship and charity and faith harden themselves 
42 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 43 

into machines; their life grows dull and stagnant. 
Oh, for a prophet, we cry, to plunge down to the 
principles of things, and make them live with some 
true reason for being done ! Oh, for a dream to 
soften this hard outline, and make it richly blend 
with universal life and catch its value ! Oh, for a 
vision which shall glorify the dull present with the 
sight of its own splendid possibilities! " Where 
there is no vision, the people perish," said Solomon. 
It was his assertion of the necessity of the inspired 
and spiritual element in life. The prophet, the 
vision, and the dream are as needful to the active 
life as the fountain to the stream, or as the bloom 
to the fruit, or as the fragrance to the flower, or as 
the soul to the man. 

And there is where appears the glory and great- 
ness of religious life . . . because, filling life 
with itself, it opens the gates of the mystery of 
life, makes it conscious of great, gracious, awful 
relationships, and turns every true believer into 
something of a seer. And it is religion as a rela- 
tionship that fills the soul with vision. Have you 
not seen it ? The martyr goes singing to the stake ; 
it is as if he walked hand-in-hand with his beloved 
Christ, being led by Him into the very presence of 
the Father. The poor working woman sits with her 



44 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Bible on her knees, and the grim, dingy walls of her 
cabin expand and fade away, the worn face glows 
and softens into the beauty of an ageless youth, and 
the feet which an hour ago could just drag them- 
selves home over the sidewalk from her long day's 
toil, are walking lightly with Christ beside the tree- 
shaded River of the water of life. It is a great rela- 
tionship, a great Love in which her soul is bathing. 
May that be the religion and the power of the re- 
ligion of us all ! 

The great purpose and the great results of actions 
make dreams and visions for the souls of men, 
which are always waiting to reveal themselves. . . . 
Here is the same action done by two men working 
side-by-side. One does it with delight, perhaps, in 
its details, perhaps only with monotonous reitera- 
tion of a long habit. The other does precisely the 
same thing because some great affection sent him to 
it, — his family needed the bread that he could earn, 
or he wanted to send his boy to college. 
To one the iron which he strikes and the hammer he 
strikes with, are all. To the other each spark from 
the anvil kindles to a picture ; — he sees the hungry 
faces at his home ; he sees the thirst for knowledge 
in his boy's eyes. The act stands with its sluice- 
gates open towards the hills, and down from them 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 45 

comes pouring the torrent of will and motive that 
makes the wheels of the actions turn to music. 
Suppose that every act, little or great, which men 
are doing, were thus filled with conscious motive, — 
mere dead habit exorcised, spontaneity and freedom 
and reasonable service everywhere, — would it not be 
another world than this — that world in which the 
prophecy should be fulfilled, and the old men should 
dream dreams ? 

Still it would be a question how far back each 
dreamer's dream should go, into what regions of 
memory, what depth of first forces, it should be 
strong enough to carry him. We know where his 
who was most adventurous and profound must carry 
him ; it could stop nowhere short of God. God is 
the only final dream of man. Door after door 
opens ; there is no final chamber till we come where 
He sits. All that ought to be done in the world has 
a right to know itself finally as done for Him. 

Then, there is the other side, what perhaps is 
more fitly called the vision, — by which we mean the 
look forward into the results of things. Yet this 
vision-seeing power, like the dream-dreaming power, 
completes and rounds itself in God. Many magnifi- 
cent and fascinating pictures open themselves before 
the seer of visions as he anticipates what the great 



46 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

redeemed and perfected world some day will be ; — 
civilizations, institutions, education, forms of soci- 
ety, types of character, — all these in manifold, 
entrancing beauty fill the western sky, but they all 
get their radiance, as they get their unity, from 
God. The western sky has clouds of infinitely va- 
rious glory, but the one source and centre of the 
glory is the sun. 

Is not this the Vision of visions, the Vision in 
which all other visions are enfolded ? Man shall 
find God; the imperfect shall come to perfection; 
the part shall rest itself in the whole ; the child shall 
come to the Father's house. In many forms, in 
many colors, that is the vision which keeps the 
world's fainting heart alive, and makes the earth, 
through all its years of sorrow, rich with an under- 
treasure of perpetual joy. 

When Jesus is going to wash His disciples' feet at 
the Last Supper, it is said that He does this action 
knowing that "He came from God and went to 
God." What words are these ! " He came from 
God and went to God," — are not the dream and the 
vision there, the God behind Him and the God 
before ? No wonder that the act has lived and been 
a power ! 

Now, there are men who, at least sometimes, do 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 47 

actions as Christ did that, knowing that they come 
from God and go to God. You say they are excep- 
tions ! That is just what the Bible says, — " Among 
whom ye shine as lights in the world." . . . 
Here is the strength of this great prophecy; the 
thing it prophesies is already on the earth. It 
shines in many an exalted soul. It shines supremely 
in Jesus. It has not to be created as something 
new; it has to be spread abroad, so that all men, 
women, and children shall be sharers in it. The 
light is here ; some day it is to lighten every man. 
That is the glory of possibility which fills our proph- 
ecy. That gives us the opportunity of enthusiastic 
hope. 

Thus, with somewhat of the Seer, 
Must the moral pioneer 

From the Future borrow, 
Clothe the waste with dreams of grain, 
And on midnight's skies of rain 

Paint the golden morrow. 

O Thou who inhabitest Eternity, yet art nigh to them that seek 
Thee ; grant me by Thy grace to do all things as seeing Thee who 
art invisible, and to carry through things temporal such inspiring 
thoughts of things eternal, that I may finally come to Thy everlasting 
glory : Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



ftburebap after tbe jfiret Suntrn^ 

In the way of righteousness is life. — Prov., xii., 21. 
If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. — Matt., 
xix., 17. 

It is striking, when we see how Christianity has 
been the awakener of thought and the stimulator of 
activity in all time, to look back to Christ and see 
that there is not a word in all His teaching to urge 
men directly to think, or to exhort them to indus- 
try in common things. There is no sign in what He 
distinctly said that He cared for thought or activity 
for themselves. Men say He did not care for them 
at all. . . . But He did care. Only, He knew 
that, as the old proverb of His people ran, " Out 
of the heart are the issues of life," and that only by 
having the heart alive (and by a live heart He meant 
a good heart) could true life, permanent, reliable 
life, come to the thinking brain and toiling hands. 
Therefore He bent His whole care over the heart. 
" Is this man alive ? " He laid His hand upon the 
48 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 49 

heart to see whether it was beating, whether the 
man was trying to be good. " Is this man dead ? " 
Again He laid His finger on the heart, and so long 
as there was a flutter there, so long as He felt under 
His sensitive touch the longing to be good yet trem- 
bling in the breast, He said, " This man still lives; 
and all awakening of the cold extremities, all quick- 
ening of intellect is still possible with him." He 
did care; He does care still whether you and I are 
thoughtful and skilful, — no gain of ours that is not 
joy to our loving Lord. But He sees divinely that 
all thought and skill must get value and real life 
only from goodness ; and on that His eye is fast- 
ened, and His care is lavished. . . . This is no 
theory. It is the law which experience has proved. 
It is a law in whose light we can read most intelli- 
gently the whole strange history of our human 
nature. Wherever goodness has been the most 
positive and most coveted possession of humanity, 
in that age, in that land, humanity, taken as a 
whole, has been most thoroughly and systematically 
alive. 

We here in America have one great, good char- 
acteristic : we hate torpidity. We glory in vitality. 
A " live man " is an American eulogy. . . . 
But who is the " live man " in whom our America 



50 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

delights ? If I find that the finger of popular admi- 
ration (which has, be it remembered, a terribly 
strong influence to carry our admiration with it) 
points to the dashing speculator, or to the scheming 
and overbearing politician, or to the wanton thinker 
ever ready to confound the faith of men with his 
half-thought theories, which he does not really 
believe himself, — if it points to these and says, 
" There is life " ; then we need to go back with all 
the conscience and reverence in our souls, and hear 
Christ saying, " I am come that they might 
have life. *' If He came to give life, then these 
are not life, for He came to give none of these 
things. 

Oh! let us keep the great, joyous love of vitality 
which is the glory of our land and time, but let us 
insist on looking deep enough for it. The " live 
man" is not the man whom men are praising for 
his energy ; very often he is the deadest of the dead, 
and what men call his life is only the putrefaction 
of his moral nature. The " live man " is the man 
who loves goodness and desires it for himself and 
his brethren, and lets his love go out into effort 
wherever it gets a chance. " If a man love Me, he 
will keep my words, and my Father will love him, 
and we will come unto him and make our abode 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 5 1 

with him," — there was Christ's idea of a live man — 
the life of God in the soul of man. 

Let no other life delude us. Let us feel Him 
standing with His hand upon our hearts, and know 
that He thinks nothing of any life that He does not 
feel beating there with the steady pulse of love for 
holiness and Him. 

How know I that I am alive ? 

So only as I thrive 
On truth, whose sweetness keeps the soul 

Vigorous and pure and whole : 
Heaven's breath within is immortality, — 
The life that is, and evermore shall be. 

O Christ, Who art the Fountain of life, grant that we thirst after 
no life that is not life in Thee, but that we strive ever to follow the 
steps of Thy most holy life, that so we may glorify Thee, and finally 
attain to everlasting life. Amen. 



Jfri&ap after tbe jfirst 5unba$- 

For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are 
sanctified. — Heb., x., 14. 

That through death He might destroy him that had the power of 
death, that is, the devil. — Heb., ii., 14. 

DOES that mean that we have not to fight with 
sin, because Christ has fought with it ? Or does it 
mean that His fighting with sin shows us how to 
fight with it and be successful ? Does it not mean 
both ? Is there not a double vicariousness, — a 
vicariousness of substitution, and a vicariousness of 
illustration ? When the Lord goes, in our place, 
into the midst of sin, into the jaws of death, it is 
as when a brave guide climbs before a party of 
travellers up the face of a steep wall of ice, which 
they must all mount after him. He goes for them, 
not for himself. If he were going for himself alone, 
some venturous spring in what is for them an impos- 
sible place might set him in a moment on the ridge 
they have to reach, but he goes in a way where they 
can follow him. And as he goes he does two things 
52 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 53 

for them : First, he cuts down certain hindrances 
over which he has to clamber, so that when they 
come they do not have to clamber over them ; and, 
second , he shows them the way to climb the steep- 
est places, and cuts them footsteps in the ice so that 
they may be able to go where he has gone. He 
cries out to his poor, timid followers, " This thing 
you need not do, for I have done it"; and at 
other times he cries, " This thing you shall be able 
to do, for I have done it." 

Is it not so with Jesus and what He did for us ? 
There are some burdens of sin which no soul need 
ever bear, because of what the Saviour has already 
borne. There is a terror in death which we need 
never know, because He has died. There are some 
depths of darkness into which we look, but into 
which we need never descend, because He went 
so deep for us into the mysterious pain of life and 
death. Some clouds scatter as we approach them 
when we challenge them in the name of " His 
Agony and Bloody Sweat, His Cross and Passion, 
His Precious Death and Burial." And then there 
are other clouds, sufferings, fears, temptations, 
doubts, which do not scatter; into them we have to 
walk. But into them we know hozv to walk because 
He has already walked there. It is not a trackless 



54 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

waste ; the wisdom and the strength come from our 
Lord. 

I think that, as the disciples came back from the 
Cross, and as they went on into their life, they must 
have become richly aware of how in both these ways 
their Lord had died for them. There were battles 
which they need not fight because He had fought 
them ; there were other battles which they must 
fight all the more, but in which they certainly would 
be victorious because of His victory. Oh, that you 
and I could see that there are some darkest strug- 
gles from which we are forever released and ex- 
empted by His struggle ! there are doubts, torments, 
agonies, which He underwent once for all, and we 
may pass them with unwounded feet and thankful 
hearts, as men walk free and happy over a battle- 
field where once their liberties were won, in a long, 
horrible day of fight and blood. Those burdens we 
are not to carry ; that fight is not to be fought out 
again. 

And there are other struggles which we must 
meet, — fights with our sins, struggles to be pure, 
and brave, and true, and kind, and holy. From 
those He cannot save us. The shadow of His 
Cross, falling on them, is not obliteration but inspi- 
ration. We cannot be spared the doing of them by 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 55 

Him, but we can do them by Him, and that is better. 
See how complete is the salvation of the Cross for 
the man who is rescued from every suffering his soul 
can spare, and strengthened for every suffering and 
duty that his soul needs, by the Crucified Christ! 
By one sacrifice He hath perfected forever them that 
should be sanctified. 

By that one sacrifice! Such is the mystery of 
tireless Grace and Love. It seems so far off, that 
Cross of Jesus, and it really is so near! For it is 
lifted up so high that the waves of time roll un- 
heeded and unmeaning at its foot. It is the power 
of perfection for us to-day. We too may cast at its 
foot the burdens and the sufferings which we need 
not keep, because our Lord has taken them ; and in 
its light we may renew the fight with sin which we 
must fight, from which we cannot escape, but in 
which we shall surely conquer because our Lord has 
conquered. No soul ought to be carrying any 
weight or trouble which really is its Lord's, or to be 
discouraged in any task or trouble which is really its 
own. 

The herb that brings forgetfulness, 

And makes all wounds grow whole, 
And sends God's peace to soothe and bless 

The hopeless travailing soul, 



$6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

And has immortal power to still 
The fiercest wind and tide, 
Springs at the foot of that dark hill 
Where Christ was crucified. 

O Blessed Saviour, Who earnest to destroy the works of the devil, 
suffer not devil, world, or flesh to destroy us ; neither suffer ourselves 
to destroy ourselves. Give us grace to do what we can to help our- 
selves, and of Thy free grace do Thou for us and in us what we 
cannot. For Thy mercy's sake. Amen. 



Saturbap after tbe first Suntrn^ 

What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light. — Matt., 
x., 27. 

Who does not long to speak words that shall be 
like sunbeams, opening and illuminating every cor- 
ner of a hearer's life ? But when we look at our 
own selves, when we see how, the more we learn of 
truth, the more the vastness of what we do not 
know opens before us, we are set to wondering how 
it is possible that out of such darkness light can 
come. The duty of giving clear light grows no less 
imperative, but we marvel how we are to give to 
others what we do not find in ourselves, how it is 
possible to fulfil the commission, " What I tell you 
in darkness, that speak ye in light." 

Yet this duty of speaking in the light, of bringing 
truth clearly to other souls than our own, belongs 
to every one of us, and every one meets the same 
question, — " How shall I speak in light that which 
God speaks to me in darkness ?" Just see what 
57 



58 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

the illustrations are. Here is a mother to whom a 
child is looking with the implicit faith of childhood. 
To him she is infallible. He has a faith in her which 
never questions; and day by day he walks in the 
clear light that her words give him. The difference 
of right and wrong, the lines of what he must do and 
must not do, the truth of God, the truth of Christ, 
the other world that is to come, — it is the light from 
her teachings that falls on all of these and makes 
them truth to him. And yet how many a time the 
mother, with her deeper thought, has felt in what a 
darkness it was that God spoke to her what she 
spoke to her boy in such light, how much of mystery 
there was enveloping all that she made so plain to 
him ! Or take some man in the community who is 
always a source of light to all his fellow-citizens. 
His words cast their illumination over every sub- 
ject. . . . But do we think that every con- 
viction leaped in a moment to his consciousness, 
that it is not by some transmission through his 
experience, often clouded with dust, that the 
abstract truth has passed into the clear, sharp, 
tangible statement of duty which his fellows catch 
from him ? 

We believe that, however inadequate our state- 
ment of the truth may be, still it is true ; and, bear- 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 59 

ing its inadequacy always in our mind, we still have 
such a knowledge as may serve for a law of life and 
lead us towards the fuller apprehension, — such, 
therefore, as we may rejoice to teach our brethren. 
. . . For is there any knowledge that is perfect ? 
Is it not true of every knowledge which we have 
that its best statements are but imperfect formulas 
which represent afar of! what we by no means 
wholly know ? And yet upon these knowledges we 
act, and by our faithful use of them are always com- 
ing nearer to the perfect knowledge. The seaman 
knows but the beginning of the mysteries of winds 
and waves, and yet, using the knowledge which he 
has, he steers his ship across the ocean to the harbor 
on the other side. The statesman learns in dark- 
ness the dark principles of national life, and yet out 
of that darkness he brings certain laws of govern- 
ment, and guides his people into brighter and 
brighter light. So everywhere we act upon imper- 
fect knowledge, which is true as far as it goes, and 
correctly though inadequately represents the perfect. 
And so with Christ, — who of us claims to know His 
nature wholly ? I know that when we come to 
heaven, we shall see Him as we do not see Him 
now ; but yet the Christ we know now is the true 
Christ, though not the whole Christ. I am sure 



60 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

that it is right for me to love and trust Him as if I 
knew Him perfectly. ... I see the reasonable- 
ness of the principle which He Himself has laid 
down — that, by the obedience and love of what we 
know already, we may always be led into the knowl- 
edge of far more. That principle unlocks the gates 
of everlasting growth. Before me stretches the con- 
tinual revelation of my Lord. Eternity can never 
grow so old that I shall not be, just as I am more 
and more obedient to Christ, more wise in Christ for 
ever. 

To all who have to teach or to comfort (and who 
is there of us into whose lot it does not sometimes 
fall), is not this the lesson that must come ? — we 
who would help each other need a profounder 
experience, a profounder love of truth ourselves. 
Down into serious contemplation of sacred and 
eternal things we must go to get the help our 
brothers need, down into the darkness of those 
thoughts where man comes close to God, to learn 
what we may teach in the light. . . . Oh, 
that we could understand how deep Christ went for 
all the help and teaching that He gave! Out of the 
darkness of the wilderness came the light of the 
temple. Out of the darkness of the tomb came the 
light of the resurrection. 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FIRST SUNDAY. 6 1 

O fathers, mothers, friends, ministers, teachers, 
scholars, men ! in all our darkness we must give 
each other light. To love the truth on one hand 
and our brethren on the other, to love God and 
God's children, that will make our human nature 
transparent so that God can shine through it. For 
this one thing we are sure of — that no man ever yet 
loved Christ, and loved his brother, that Christ did 
not find His own way through him into his brother, 
and so help and enlighten both the humble teacher 
and learner with Himself. 

May that give courage to all of us who teach and 
learn ! 

He hath spoken in the darkness, 

In the silence of the night, 
Spoken sweetly of the Father, 

Words of life, and love and light . . . 
What He telleth in the darkness — 

Songs He giveth in the night — 
Rise and speak it in the morning, 

Rise and sing them in the light ! 

He hath spoken in the darkness, 

In the silence of thy grief, 
Sympathy so deep and tender, 

Mighty for thy heart-relief . . . 
What He tells thee in the darkness, 

Weary watcher for the day, 



62 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Grateful lip and life should utter 
When the shadows flee away. 

He is speaking in the darkness, 

Though thou canst not see His face, 
More than angels ever needed, — 

Mercy, pardon, love and grace . . . 
What He tells thee in the darkness, 

Whispers through Time's lonely night, 
Thou shalt speak in glorious praises, 

In the everlasting light ! 

O Lord Jesus, the Truth, the Wisdom, the Word of God ; of 
Thine exceeding goodness make me, I beseech Thee, to learn so 
diligently and humbly of Thee, that I may be replenished with 
wisdom however scant my knowledge ; and may be able to speak 
gracious words or keep gracious silence in all my daily walk with 
Thee and with those whom Thou hast given me. Amen. 



Second Sunbap in Xent 

These three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job. — Ezek., xiv., 14. 

Noah, the Believer in God's Word, Daniel, the 
Doer of God's Law, and Job, the patient Bearer of 
God's Will, — these are the three forms in which life 
comes to every man, these are the three characters 
into which men are trained by every faithful accept- 
ance of their life at the hands of God, and these 
are the three types of loyalty in whose completion 
humanity would be complete. To one man life is 
a problem to be solved ; it is the darkness which 
distresses him; it is light, only light, which he 
craves. To another man life is a duty to be done, 
a task that calls for power and steadfastness ; — weak- 
ness and fear and idleness are what he dreads. And 
yet to other men life is a burden to be borne, — a 
weight laid heavily upon the shoulders which needs 
a simple, passive strength that will not yield, a 
steadying of the bent back, a stiffening of the 
trembling muscles to bear the heavy downward 
63 



64 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

pressure of this human living. Often these types 
of character follow each other in the course of one 
developing life. . . . The man who has known 
life only as a problem beginning to realize it as a 
task, and seeing it grow clear, concrete, and almost 
solid before his eyes ; or the man who has known life 
as a task becoming gradually aware of its mystery 
and almost seeing its narrow limitations open and 
its infmiteness manifest itself; or the man in whom 
there has been the craving for truth and the faith- 
fulness in work coming at last to see that there is a 
crown to both of these, which can come only when 
a man is content to sit in the darkness and wait for 
the will of God ; — these are the moments of rich 
experience, the times when Noah, Daniel, and Job 
meet one another in the city of our life. 

We see that this is not a fancy; we know that 
these are indeed perpetually distinct types of human 
character, because of the different sorts of men 
which we see that they produce entirely apart from 
religion. . . . They appear, clearly distinguish- 
able, in the most earthly pagan life. There, too, 
are Noah, Daniel, and Job, the counterparts, in the 
lower sphere of self-reliance, of the great heroes of 
the upper world of faith in God. . . . One man 
peers into life to understand it ; another man lays 



SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT. 65 

his strong hands on life to do it ; another man 
bends his back simply to take it. But our three 
men in the Bible add something to this ; — they do 
not merely indicate the different dispositions and 
illustrate the different lots of men which we see 
everywhere, but they live their different lives in 
obedience to God. One love pervades them all. 
Noah listens in docility while God tells him how the 
ark of his safety must be built ; Daniel lifts up his 
eyes to God, and then goes and does his duty in 
Babylon with the den of roaring lions yawning at 
his side; Job sits in his misery and bears it patiently 
because it came from God. Then out of their several 
centuries, out of their scattered homes — Noah out 
of his far distant antiquity where we can fix neither 
time nor place, Daniel out of Babylon, Job out of 
the land of Uz — they come and meet in this city of 
Ezekiel's vision. Noah hears his messages, Daniel 
does his faithful work, Job meets his pain, in these 
streets which have existence only in the prophet's 
dream. At once that unbuilt city becomes the pic- 
ture of the world in which humanity works out its 
great career under the care of God. Life the Prob- 
lem, Life the Task, and Life the Burden, meet the 
souls of men everywhere ; and, by the docility and 
fidelity and patience which are trained in them, 



66 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

the city of our human life is gradually filled with 
God. 

Surely it gives us a very deep sense of the rich- 
ness of the world and its material when we see how 
in it and by it God may thus train the natures of 
His children. We abuse the world, we talk of how 
it hides the truth from us, of how it threatens us 
or allures us to do what is wrong, of how its hard 
blows make us suffer, of how its heavy weights 
crush us, but certainly there is another thought, 
more gracious and more generous, about this rich 
old Earth that so uncomplainingly takes our com- 
plaints, and never withholds its bounty for all our 
fretfulness and grumbling. Certainly, if mystery can 
make faith, and temptation can make fidelity, and 
pain can make patience, then the Earth which teems 
with all three may be a very blessed place. All 
through eternity we may look back out of the per- 
fect light and holiness and joy of heaven, and love 
the old Earth, where these mixed and troubled 
years were lived, for the memory of its mystery, its 
temptation, and its pain. 

The city is rich in which there is a Noah, a Dan- 
iel, and a Job. Each adds his element to what the 
rest contribute, and the whole city's life grows bal- 
anced and complete. The life is rich which God 



SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT. 67 

has filled with knowledge, duty, and patience, mak- 
ing them all channels through which He gives to it 
Himself. Let us pray to Him that we may rebel 
against no treatment, though it seem to us very hard, 
which enriches us with any one of these elements 
that we may lack; and makes us a little more wise 
with His wisdom, or faithful to His law, or patient 
under His will. For so only can we gain Him, 
whom to have perfectly is the perfection of our life. 

The very thinking of the thought, 

Without or praise or prayer. 
Gives light to know, and life to do, 

And marvellous strength to bear. 

O my God, bestow upon me such confidence, such peace, such 
happiness in Thee, that Thy will may always be dearer to me than 
my own will, and Thy pleasure than my own pleasure. All that 
Thou givest is Thy free gift to me, all that Thou takest away Thy 
grace to me. Be Thou thanked for all, praised for all, loved for 
all. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



flDonfcap after tbe Seconb Sun&a?. 

He that seeketh His glory that sent Him, the same is true, and no 
unrighteousness is in Him. — John, vii., 18. 

Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. — I Cor., x., 31. 

UTTERLY broken away from the easy peace of 
careless living, incapable of it by His whole nature, 
Jesus had pressed on until He had entered into that 
other peace which lies beyond, the peace of a per- 
petual consciousness of God. When I look at His 
life, when I hear Him saying, with a rich content- 
ment in His voice that makes needless the sight of 
a smile on His face, " The Father hath not left me 
alone, for I do always the things which please 
Him," — then I understand by contrast the misery 
of that false self-consciousness which is always ques- 
tioning whether God has not deserted it, and which 
shrinks from any frank filial assurance that its strug- 
gles to do His will have surely pleased Him. But 
none the less, as I hear Jesus say these words, do I 
shrink from the cheap and weak philosophy which, 
63 



MONDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 69 

because self-consciousness is likely to be morbid, 
would stifle self-consciousness altogether, — which, 
because souls may misconceive their relation to 
God, would bid the soul forget its relation to God 
entirely and live as if it belonged only to the earth, 
finding its task only as the brook finds its path from 
the slope of the rock that it runs over, not as the 
tide finds its way up to the beach by the summons 
of the moon over its head, — forgetting God and 
only remembering the task that He has given, and 
trusting God to find His own way to the soul that 
does His task, hoping that it may at length be filled 
unconsciously with Him. 

There is much of such exhortation now-a-days, 
and we can see where it has come from ; it is the 
sight of morbid self-consciousness making men want 
to stifle self-consciousness altogether. But Jesus 
teaches us a better way. With Him self-conscious- 
ness is perfect. Not merely His task, but the pur- 
pose of His task, and, as the soul of its purpose, the 
Giver of His task, are with Him always. " I do 
always the things which please Him," He declares. 
He never loses Himself in His task, in our ordinary 
sense, — a sense in which when we lose ourselves in 
our tasks, we often escape from self-consciousness 
and pride only to condemn ourselves to sordidness 



yo THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

and pettiness. Jesus loses Himself not in His task, 
but in His Father: " My meat is to do the will of 
Him that sent me, and to finish His work." And 
then He opens this experience of His into a uni- 
versal law of life, — " He that seeketh His glory 
that sent Him, the same is true, and no unrighteous- 
ness is in Him." O my dear friends, there is our 
safety ! If you think about the details of your work 
as if there were nothing beyond them, you grow 
special, narrow, petty. If you think about yourself 
and your culture or your credit in your work, you 
grow either proud or moody. If you think about 
your Father who gave you your work, you grow 
faithful, serene, happy, and noble ; and, what is 
best of all, you come through Him into true sympa- 
thy with all other workers who are aware of Him, 
however different their work may be from yours. 
Only, in order to attain all this, you must know 
through all your life that God is your Father, and 
that He has indeed given you what you are doing. 
. . . If a man or woman is able to get and keep 
that [knowledge], there is no drudgery so mean and 
crushing that it cannot be lifted and made buoyant 
— absolutely none. ... If you can do it for 
God, in perfect, childlike, loving desire for His 
glory, then your work, be it as heavy in its nature 



MONDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 7 1 

as it may, leaps itself from the low ground, and car- 
ries you every day into the presence of the God for 
whom you do it. That is the continual beauty of a 
consecrated life, possible under all sorts of circum- 
stances, possible to every kind of man in every kind 
of task. 

Lord, give me light to do Thy work ; 

For only, Lord, from Thee 
Can come the light by which these eyes 

The way of work can see. 

The work is Thine, not mine, O Lord ; 

It is Thy race we run ; 
Give light, and then shall all I do, 

Be well and truly done. 

O God, Who has set us our work to do in life, give us grace to do 
it in and for Thee. Grant that no temptation of this present evil 
world may lead us to forget that Thee, and only Thee, we must 
serve in all things. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Guee&a? after tbe Seconb Sun&a\>. 

They answered Him, We . . . were never in bondage to any 
man. — John, viii., 33. 

Sin is one master in many forms, but when it has 
taken its slave it holds him with a terrible power. 
Not that the slave is always conscious of it ; such is 
his strange perversion that sometimes he takes the 
very fact of his slavery and makes it out to be a 
proof of freedom. Look at the young man in the 
hideous career of dissipation : he calls it liberty ; 
he waves his flag as he rushes along, and says, 
" Behold, how free I am!" He is honest enough; 
he thinks that he is free. But let him try to stop ! 
— then he finds that the headlong rush which he 
calls freedom is really slavery. It is as much slavery 
when a torrent is whirled helpless on to the sea as 
when a lake lies rotting in forced stagnation under 
the sun. Oh! there is no power of sin so subtle 
and so hateful as that which makes the sinner think 
that he is free in sinning. 
72 



TUESDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 7$ 

Another of our masters is fear. There is no man 
with sense enough to feel the Infinite which is close 
to him, and who is destitute of a religious assurance 
of reconciliation and harmony with that Infinite, 
who is not afraid. If anything goes wrong, if any 
panic smites a people, you feel a thrill and stir which 
let you know that no man has forgotten the mystery 
and awfulness of life, no man has forgotten that 
only a thin plank of fragile circumstance separates 
him from the infiniteness of eternity and God. It is 
not an ignoble fear; it is noble. It is the conscious- 
ness of being out of place, out of relation to what we 
have to do with, — floating on eternity and God, but 
foreign to them. The only release comes by the 
soul becoming perfectly reconciled with the Infinite 
on which it rests, entering into the nature of the 
mystery it feared, becoming the child of God. 
Then it cannot fear God any longer, any more than 
the wave fears the deep sea out of which it sprang, 
with which it is one in nature, upon whose breast it 
runs its race, and to which it returns. 

Another kind of slavery is our slavery to men, 
from which nothing can set us free except the libera- 
tion which comes to us as the sons of God. 
All simple rebellion against our brethren's dictation 
and assumed authority makes us obstinate and turns 



74 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

us into outlaws. We must take refuge from the 
authority of man in the fatherly authority of God, 
or we are like prisoners escaped from a prison into a 
desert, who must sooner or later come back to their 
prison again, and beg to be taken into it as their 
only refuge from cold and starvation. 

[But] our worst slavery is our slavery to our- 
selves. Its terribleness is in its intimacy. The self 
that is despot and the self that is slave are so very 
close together ! It seems as if nothing could come 
in between them. But when something does, — 
when closer to ourself than ourself comes in our 
brother, so that we would rather give ourself to him 
than to ourself, — then the self-bondage is broken, 
and our chains lie at our feet. But closer than our 
brother comes our Father, — nay, our brother comes 
closest to us only in our Father's closeness, and so 
the real release from the bondage of self-love comes 
with the love of God. We escape from the slavery 
of selfishness only as we come into the liberty of the 
children of God. Not to deny yourselves, O friends, 
but to love and serve God is the way to break down 
the tyranny. 

This is the story of man's slavery; these are our 
masters. Jesus said once to the Jews who were 
crowding around Him and calling themselves His 



TUESDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 75 

disciples, " You shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free." They answered Him, " We 
be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to 
any man." Jesus answered them, " Verily, verily, 
I say unto you ; whosoever committeth sin is the 
servant of sin." It was the same thing there in old 
Jerusalem, precisely the same thing which we have 
here to-day. Christ comes to men and wants to 
free them with His truth; and the answer is, " We 
are not slaves; it is absurd, fanatical to talk so." 
But what is the real truth ? Are you free ? When 
not a day passes that there is not some brave, gen- 
erous, self-sacrificing, truthful, godly thing which 
you know you ought to do, but which you do not 
do because your sin, or your fear, or your neighbor, 
or yourself, forbids you, do you need no liberation ? 
Oh, we are not free, not wholly free, one of us; and 
we never shall be till we are thoroughly back in our 
Father's family, thoroughly the children of God 
through Christ. " If the Son shall make us free, 
we shall be free indeed." 

When a little child is brought to Baptism in that 
grand, sweet Sacrament which men make so small 
and petty, it is " made the child of God." In the 
declaration of its essential nature, in the anticipation 
of its best possibility, it is laid in its Father's arms, 



76 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

and declared to be His. That act is the declaration 
of the child's emancipation. Not under sin, not in 
fear, not by other men's standards, not for himself, 
that child is to live; but there, at the very outset 
of his life, it is sublimely recognized that he can 
escape from all these only by claiming his place in 
his Father's household. If he is not God's child, 
why should he not be the world's drudge ? 

Oh, that that truth of the Baptism might run 
through all our lives! Oh, that we might expect 
no holiness, no courage, no independence, no self- 
sacrifice, except in the household and the heart of 
our Father; no liberty except the glorious liberty of 
the children of God ! 

One Master, only one, have we ; 

His rule is perfect liberty ; 

His law is love, his love is life ; 

His service sets us free from strife, 

From fear, from self, from sin, from death ; 

In Him alone we draw free breath ; 

And, every earthly bondage riven, 

At last He makes us free of heaven ! 

Almighty and everlasting God, of Whose only gift it cometh that 
Thy faithful people do unto Thee true and laudable service ; Grant, 
we beseech Thee, that we may so faithfully serve Thee in this life 
that we fail not finally to attain Thy heavenly promises ; through 
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Metmeebap after tbe Seconb Sunbai?. 

Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, 
his servants ye are to whom ye obey ; whether of sin unto death, or 
of obedience unto righteousness? — Rom., vi., 16. 

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth 
itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity 
every thought to the obedience of Christ. — 2 Cor., x., 15. 

He that abideth in . . Christ, he hath both the Father and 

the Son. — 2 John, 9. 

He that hath the Son hath life. — 1 John, v., 12. 

This setting of the less and finite into the com- 
plete Infinite Nature Christ calls by various names. 
Sometimes it is faith : you must believe in God. 
Sometimes it is affection : you must love God. 
Always what it means is the same thing : you must 
belong to God. Then His life shall be your life. I 
am come to bring you to Him, that so you may 
have life, and have it more abundantly. Sometimes 
He seems to gather up His fullest declaration of 
this vital connection of man with God, and call it by 
one mighty word — obedience. You must obey God, 
and so live by Him. 

77 



78 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

How words degrade themselves! How, used to 
express a base relation between base natures, this 
great word — obedience — has grown base and hard 
and servile ! Men hate the sound of it. Men dread 
the thought of it as a disgrace. " I never will 
obey," men say, as if so they asserted the greatness 
of their souls. Is it not true that what they really 
assert is the meagreness of their lives ? He who 
obeys nothing receives nothing. Obedience, in the 
purity of its idea, is the setting of life into life as 
the tree is set into the ground, so that the life which 
is obeyed may pour its vitality into the obeying life. 
You set your life into a dead thing, and it pours 
into you its death. You obey a living thing (and to 
such only have you right to give yourself in obedi- 
ence), and at once you are a sharer in its life. This 
is the principle under which the strength of the 
strongest becomes the possession of the weak, and 
the whole universe throbs with the mutual minis- 
tries of its parts. You obey a Law, which is but a 
Truth declaring its authority, and all the richness of 
the Truth, and of the Law which expresses it, is 
yours. You obey the master, and the art you wish 
to learn, and all the treasuries which his long years 
of study and toil have filled to overflowing, open 
their gates to you. . . . 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 7Q 

Let us glorify Obedience. It is not slavery, but 
mastery. He who obeys is master of the master 
whom he serves. He has his hand in the very 
depths of his master's treasures. When God says 
to His people, " Do this and live," He is not mak- 
ing a bargain; He is declaring a necessary truth. 

He who does My will, possesses Me; for My will 
is the broad avenue to the deepest chambers of My 
life. There is nothing in Me that he who obeys Me 
may not reach according to his power. ' Son, thou 
art ever with me, and all that I have is thine ' ; " — 
so speaks the infinite God to the obedient child. 
But to disobedience the door is closed. Whatever 
wealth there may be is none of his. Obedience 
means mastery and wealth. Therefore let us glorify 
obedience, which is light and life, and dread diso- 
bedience, which is darkness and death. Find your 
true masters, and obey them. For only in obedi- 
ence do you enrich your life. Live and obey. 
Obey and live. 

Christ crowded it all into His parable of the Tal- 
ents. The Talent in the napkin — action shunned 
because action is dangerous — that is not life, but 
death. "Act! act! turn powers into deeds," is the 
perpetual exhortation of the Lord of Life. There 
is a stingy caution which will do nothing for fear of 



80 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

doing wrong, and so does wrong all the time. But 
all the time the talent is the Lord's talent, to be 
used in obedience to Him. " Thou oughtest to have 
put my money to the exchangers, and then at my 
coming I should have received mine own." Every 
deed is part of one great drama through which flows 
one vast purpose, by union with which purpose 
alone does any deed be strong. What folly it is to 
be selfish ! It is one wheel of the vast engine unbelt- 
ing itself from all its brother wheels, saying, " I will 
spin my own music; I will not be obedient," and 
lo ! it whirls wildly into space a minute, and then 
drops into the sand and dies. That is dissipation ; 
that is what men sometimes call Life. Blessed is it 
if the poor, wretched, dissipated wheel is taken up 
by the kind master of the engine, and reforged in 
any hot furnace of pain, and set once more in its 
true place from whence it flew. That is blessed ; 
but a thousand-fold more blessed is it for the wheel 
which catches from the first the glory of service, 
makes every revolution a delight in responding to 
the throb and beat of the central power, finds every 
deed dignified by the entire motion of the whole, 
loses itself and so finds itself, and lives by obedience, 
and lives ever more and more abundantly. 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 8 1 

Knowledge, will — 
These twain are strong, but stronger yet the third, — 

Obedience ; — 't is the great tap-root that still, 
Knit round the rock of duty, is not stirred, 
Though heaven-loosed tempests spend their utmost skill. 

Lord Jesus, grant me grace to come to Thee in obedience, and by 
constant obedience to abide with Thee ; that my foundation may be 
upon the Rock of Ages, and that underneath me may be the Ever- 
lasting Arms. Hold me fast that I may cleave unto Thee ; embrace 
me that I may cling to Thee. Amen. 



Gbursbap after tbe Seconfc Sun&a^ 

Because the creature itself shall be delivered from bondage into 
the glorious liberty of the sons of God. — Rom., viii., 21. 

THE centralness of man! All truest study of the 
world finds in the human life its purpose and its 
key. Everything in Nature, every plant and min- 
eral, if we watch it long enough, wisely enough, 
opens its heart and reveals some service which it is 
made to render to our life. The Bible speaks, and 
under its majestic symphony of human history runs 
a deep, correspondent music from the dumb and 
brutish world ; the primal innocence of man blooms 
in a blooming garden ; the fall of man and his long 
struggle upward brings the picture of a world all 
thorns and thistles, bleakness and bitterness, with 
richness and fertility laboring beneath, and more 
and more breaking their hard but certain way 
through. All civilized societies, all little circles of 
people using the world, and making the world they 
use assume their aspect, — all of these testify to 
82 



THURSDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 83 

how " the creature," by the law of God who made 
it, shares in the character and destiny of man who is 
its master. 

This is just Paul's idea. The world, he says, is 
what man makes it. It rises and falls with him. 

The world is not bad," he declares; " if anything 
is bad, it is you. You curse the world; the world 
does not curse you. The world is what you make 
it." And then he goes on with a great, suggestive 
figure: " The whole trouble lies here," he says, — 
" man is not free. Man is a slave." The creature, 
then, the whole created world, is not merely a ser- 
vant, it is the servant of a servant ; it is a slave of a 
slave. If man were really free, the world's dignity 
and power would consist in doing his will ; as it is, 
with him a slave, its disgrace and shame lie in the 
fact that it shares his slavery. It never can come 
to its full beauty and effect till it is called out by 
him to its best service, till he becomes free, and it, 
serving a free master, has a chance to show its best. 
Everywhere the slave of a slave is wretched. 
His slave-master vents on him the misery and rage 
of his disgrace. There is no hope for the slave- 
servant till first the slave-master is made free, and 
he is delivered from bondage into the glorious lib- 
erty which his lord attains. 



84 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

I ask one of you men, " Why are you not a [bet- 
ter] Christian ?" What is your answer ? " Oh, 
my business ! It holds me ; it restrains me ; I can- 
not think of spiritual things. I cannot consecrate 
myself. My business is of the earth, earthy; it 
holds me down." 

That business is your world. It is " the crea- 
ture " with which you have to do. It is your slave. 
And you, you are a slave to your own selfishness, to 
your own lust of gain. Your business shares your 
slavery. It is the slave of a slave. Of course it is 
degrading. But suppose you were free ; suppose, 
by a strong struggle and with the grace of God, you 
broke your chains and were no longer selfish ; sup- 
pose you loved God, and meant to serve Him, Him 
alone. That business of yours would then be a 
freeman's slave. It would be liberated in your lib- 
eration. It would no longer drag you down, but 
lift you up. It would make you a better Christian 
every day. The creature itself would be delivered 
from bondage into the glorious liberty on which you 
would have entered as a child of God. . . . 

When the race of men is liberated from all slav- 
eries into the freedom of God, the whole world is to 
be transformed, the creature is to be delivered from 
the " bondage of corruption." That is a glorious 



THURSDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 85 

picture, a mighty, fascinating vision. But a more 
immediately precious truth for you and me is this, 
— that as each man is set free now the world is 
already transformed for him, the new heaven and 
the new earth come already to the member of 
Christ, the child of God, the inheritor of the king- 
dom of heaven! I cannot doubt that this world 
was a different thing to Jesus Christ from what it is 
to us. The same color in the flowers and the sky, 
the same look in the faces of fellow-men, the same 
defects and merits in the government of Caesar, — but 
all different because He was different, — all bursting 
out with helps and Godspeeds to His holiness 
because He was the child of God, — all his Father's 
world, and so all His world, lending itself freely to 
the culture of His character and the fulfilment of 
His plans. I find no word of querulous dissatisfac- 
tion upon Jesus' lips about the world He had come 
into. It was a good enough world to live a good 
life in, — no doubt with pain, no doubt with violent 
collisions, but yet with no impossibilities. There 
was nothing in it which the good man might not use 
for good. And always man was not to be improved 
by being put into a better world, the world was to 
be renewed by the occupation of a renewed and 
holy manhood. 



86 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Against the cowardly and bitter way with which 
we charge our sins upon our circumstances, that 
clear, brave, happy tone of Jesus rings out like the 
trumpet that announces the morning. Not in our 
stars, but in ourselves; not in the world, but in the 
man the trouble lies. Not in your world, but in 
you. If you are free in Christ your world shall leap 
to help you. And freedom comes by faith. Believe 
in Christ, and let Him lead you to His Father, and 
nothing can hold you prisoner or keep you from 
being all that His Father and your Father made 
you to be. 

. . . Ah, so may all be free ! 

Then shall the world grow sweet at core and sound, 
And, moved in blest and ordered circuit, see 

The bright millennial sun rise fair and round, 
Heaven's day begin, and Christ, whose service is 
Freedom all perfect, rule the world as His. 

Blessed Jesus, Who earnest to preach deliverance to the captives, 
give us holy freedom ; strike off these binding chains of sin and 
lead us forth into the land of righteousness ; for Thy Name's sake. 
Amen. 



ffriba? after tbe Seconb Sunba^ 

He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live 
unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again. 
— 2 Cor., v., 15. 

When we recall how Jesus seemed to be driven 
by other people to His death, how the Jews plotted 
against Him, how His own friend betrayed Him, 
how Pilate delivered Him to His tormentors, how 
they dragged Him from the judgment hall to Gol- 
gotha, then how they drove the nails through hands 
and feet and set the Cross up in the ground, it is 
impressive to be told that He who suffered — the 
poor, meek, tortured Victim — was after all the real 
Will, the true Chooser, in the whole. It is the echo 
of those serene, sublime words of Christ Himself, 
" I lay down My life. No man taketh it from Me, 
but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it 
down, and I have power to take it again." This 
was His mastery of His own life. 

And then, this mastery is not only over life, but 
87 



88 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

over death. Christ not merely lived with a purpose, 
but He died with a purpose, too. Death seems so 
purposeless to most men ! They live with more or 
less of purpose, but they seem to die at random. 
It comes from the narrowness and shortness of all 
that they conceive. Their plans have just vitality 
enough to last this life out, but they are not vital 
enough, not spiritual enough, to spring across the 
gulf and be at home on the other side. ... It 
is possible to have the aim of life so pure and spir- 
itual that it may serve us in dying as well as in 
living. It is possible, and it is glorious. The man 
who has lived to make money cannot die so as to 
be a little richer. But the man who has lived to be 
good, and to do good, sees those ambitions that 
have led him all the way grow brighter as his way 
draws near its close. They never burned so brightly 
as when he sees them just across the River! He 
dies for his desires more earnestly than he has ever 
lived for them. That was the glory of the death of 
Christ. It was no accident ; it burns yet with the 
intensity of that same loving purpose of salvation 
which had filled all His life. " He died for all, that 
they which live should not henceforth live for them- 
selves, but unto Him which died for them." 

This phrase — " living unto " — is very pregnant. 



FRIDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 89 

The things men's lives are aimed at, the things they 
live towards, are what really make or unmake them. 
And it was that we might " not live unto ourselves " 
that Jesus died; first, that we should not live for 
our own pleasure; and, second, that we should not 
live after our own pattern. A man goes on from 
day to day with no more lofty aim than to please 
himself;— " What shall I like? What shall I 
choose ? " he asks, as every new morning starts the 
dull clock-work of his life afresh. No look pierces 
beyond himself and finds another, to please whom 
is dearer, sweeter, than to please himself. His 
desires stop, satisfied, in the fancied gardens of his 
own joy, and have no noble enterprise to travel 
farther. 

And so, too, with his standards. Matching him- 
self against himself, satisfied if he does not fall 
below the work he has already done, only disgusted 
with himself when he falls below the average that 
his own life has established, copying himself over 
and over again, he goes on in the tiresome routine 
of his low content. That is what it is for a man to 
live unto himself, — to seek forever his own pleasure, 
to copy over and over again his own imperfect life. 

Against that we set, what ? Why, living unto 
Christ. • Suppose that it is possible for a man, 



go THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

instead of trying to please himself, to be always try- 
ing to please Christ ; instead of copying himself, to 
be forever copying the perfection of the Perfect 
Life. These things arc possible ; men, women — 
yes, and little children, learn to do them both. 
Instead of asking, " What will please me ?" there 
stands up the will of Him who can only be pleased 
with the highest. Instead of the level repetition of 
himself, the man is always going up, away from 
himself, with the lofty struggle to be like the Lord. 
New hopes, — aye, and new disappointments, come 
into the life. New dreams, new visions, quicken the 
zest of living. The reign of selfishness is over; we 
are not looking down upon ourselves, we are looking 
up to Him, and going forward, going upward. 
That is living unto Him who died for us. 

Was that indeed what Jesus died for ? Was He 
thinking of all that as He toiled on, bearing the 
heavy cross to where He was to hang upon it ? He 
looked round as He went and He saw men and 
women ... as they crowded up to see the 
spectacle. And oh ! we cannot tell with what 
divine clearness, out beyond that little crowd, He 
saw the endless line of men and women who were 
yet to live, how through those shouts He heard the 
restless cries of all humanity in all its generations. 



FRIDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 9 1 

Was He thinking of it all the time — was it support- 
ing Him and making Him triumphant — was He 
always saying to Himself, " I am dying for all 
these, that all of them may live henceforth not to 
themselves, but to Me!" Oh! if Christ were less 
than we love to believe Him to be, how terrible 
these words would be! To put Himself as the 
crown and end of all things ! . The martyr 

dies, and it is not himself, it is a truth that he 
leaves burning where his ashes fell, whose manifes- 
tation and glorification he desires. If out of the 
flames about his stake there comes a voice, it says, 
not, " Live for me," but " Live for the truth that 
I have shown you that a man can die for." No 
man dare set himself before his brethren, and say, 
" Attain to me and be perfect!" But Christ says 
just that. As He struggles along, our dear Lord 
looks around and His one prayer for those people 
is that they may live to Him. All truth, all growth, 
all holiness, is wrapped up in that. It must be God 
who is so absolute, who sees in the attainment of 
Himself the perfection of mankind ! It must be 
God who knows no more terrible lamentation over a 
human soul than this, " It would not come unto 
Me " ; who has no larger prayer to pray for a human 
soul than this, — " that it may live unto Him." In 



Q2 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Him is the perfection of goodness, the entire satis- 
faction of the human soul; and that is God. 

I think we can understand it then. When the 
horizon opens, and the cloud is broken through, — 
when the Jew, travelling out of Egypt, comes to 
the borders, and the sea which lies there parts and 
opens, and beyond lies Canaan all free for him to 
enter, even though a desert is yet to cross, — when 
the man struggling to perfect himself comes to the 
borders of his selfhood, and there the sea is parted, 
and the way Lies open into the infinite holiness of 
God, even though a long and toilsome desert lies 
between, — when the old standards sink and one new 
Standard rises, and, so simple after the old life's 
complexity, so warm after the old life's coldness, 
there stands the Christ and gathers all duty and all 
hope together into one complete attainment, and 
says, " Please Me," " Be like Me; be like Me by 
pleasing Me," and when any man sets out to do 
that, makes Christ his Master, his Object, his Hope, 
his Law, — then he is living unto Christ; and he 
goes on more and more living into Christ. 

Our life is hid with Christ, 

With Christ in God above ; 
Upward our heart doth go to Him, 

Whom, seeing not, we love. 



FRIDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 93 

Like Him we then shall be, 

Transformed and glorified ; 
For we shall see Him as He is, 

And in His light abide. 

O Merciful Saviour, Who in Thy wondrous love didst give Thyself 
unto death that we might have life ; grant me grace to realize more 
and more the blessedness of living unto Thee ; so that I may faith- 
fully serve Thee here, and when I go hence may be found in Thee, 
in Whom alone is everlasting life. Neither pray I for myself alone, 
but for all whom Thou hast given me. Amen. 



Saturfca? after tbe SeconJ) Sun&ap. 

The Father himself loveth you because ye have loved Me, and 
have believed that I came forth from God. — John, xvi., 27. 

When the great, indiscriminate affection which 
God has for all His children, just because they are 
His children, begins to pulsate with discrimination, 
— when the love which has sent rain and dew with- 
out distinction passes over into a deeper love which 
gives the deeper happiness with most delicate adjust- 
ment, so that no two souls in all the world are 
blessed entirely and perfectly alike, — there can be 
only one test by which that new discrimination can 
be regulated. It must be by their power to receive 
these deeper blessings ; and so it must be by their 
personal conditions and qualities that souls are rated 
in the deeper distribution of this deeper love of 
God. And so it follows that if to " love Christ " is 
made the condition of being loved by God, then to 
" love Christ " must mean a personal condition, a 
personal quality. This is the first truth of Chris- 
tianity, without which Christianity becomes thin 



SATURDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 95 

and sentimental, — that a man must be something in 
order that he may love Christ, and so his loving 
Christ must mean that he is something. 

This rests upon a universal principle, which is 
that none can truly love a being unless he shares 
that being's nature, unless he has something of that 
being's nature in himself, and so that our loves are 
the tests and proofs of what nature there is in us, 
and so that all our advances are measured by the 
higher and higher loves of which we are always 
becoming capable. That principle lies deep in the 
very heart of all our culture and enjoyment. It is 
really the principle of life. . . . When God 
sent His Son into the world this law found its com- 
plete exhibition. Whoever loved Him should be 
loved of God ; and I think we see that it must have 
been because those who loved Him were proved 
hereby to be worthy of, or, we may more fitly say, 
to be capable of receiving the love of God. 

Think of Christ's followers, — John the Baptist, 
Peter, John, Andrew, Mary Magdalen, — nay, Mary, 
His mother, the first human being who ever loved 
Christ, the gentle leader of the hosts of souls who 
have loved Him since, — they all had this power of 
taking His greatness and making it theirs by their 
adoration of Him. And so the Father, who was 



g6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

well pleased in Him, could be well pleased in them. 
And as He sat with some of them around the 
table, He could look into their faces and say, 
" The Father loveth you because ye have loved 
Me." . . . 

Look at the Cross, — what is the love of the sinner 
who stands there at its foot, renewing the love 
of John and Mary who stood in that same cruel 
presence years ago ? Is it gratitude to Him who 
dies there, not for Himself but for the sinner ? 
Certainly it is! But can that gratitude exist unless 
the patience and the love and the loftiness and the 
purity of the Sufferer have pressed themselves upon 
the wondering soul, and won that only homage 
which any noble nature ever cares to receive from 
any other nature, — the homage of struggle for like- 
ness, of emulation ? The Cross shows not merely 
what Christ does, but what Christ is. The heart 
that beats against the Cross is not merely gathering 
into itself Christ's mercy, but shaping itself upon 
Christ's character. The love of gratitude and the 
love of adoration go together when the act that 
does the wonderful benefit likewise shows the Per- 
fect Nature. 

There is yet another thing about this love of God 
for the soul that loves Christ. It is indicated in the 



SATURDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 97 

last clause of these words of Jesus, — " The Father 
loveth you because ye have loved me, and have 
believed that I came forth from God." God is the 
sole blessing of the universe, because He fills it all, 
and there is no room in it for any other bene- 
factor. Wherever there is any real, pure joy in 
any smallest pleasure-bearing vein of man's exist- 
ence, there is God. Wherever in all the world there 
is anything really worthy of His creatures' adoration 
and emulation, it is He. He is the hero's heroism 
and the martyr's strength and the saint's piety; and 
He is always uncontent if any one of His children, 
loving any goodness anywhere, does not trace it 
back to Him, and love Him in loving it. He sees 
that none of His children get the best good out of 
any blessing unless they receive Him in it; and so 
He says, " I give Myself to those who take their 
blessings as from Me." Is not this just what Jesus 
says ? — " My Father loves you because you have 
believed that I, whom you love, came forth from 
God." He loves you because you have loved Me 
as His. Your love for Me He has accepted as love 
for Himself; and so, when I say, " He loves you 
because you have loved Me," it is but the echo of 
what He Himself said long ago, " I love them that 
love Me." 



98 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Here is the lesson for us, my friends. The more 
we can fasten the life of Jesus to, and identify it 
with, the life of God, — the more we can see in Him 
the direct utterance of the Divine, Eternal Being, — 
the more we believe that He came forth from God, 
and the more thoroughly we accept His own words, 
11 He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father " ; — 
so much the more our love to Him will win for us, 
will open our souls to and make us able to receive, 
the love of God. This is the value of our belief in 
the Divinity of Jesus; it makes Him such that love 
for Him can fit us for the love of God, which is the 
life of man. 

The love of Jesus is not only an act of the soul, 
it is a quality in the soul. I do not disparage the 
jubilant delight with which the burdened sinner 
knows his forgiveness, and stands on his feet thank- 
ing his Lord, but that thankfulness is not the love 
of Jesus. Only when to a soul, in silence or in 
tumult, forth from all the mass and multitude of 
being, He, Jesus Christ, stands supreme, alone, and 
the soul, giving itself to His service, finds in Him 
the complete utterance of Divine Goodness and 
Divine Help, and grows like Him by its admiration 
and adoration, — then, then only does a soul love 
Jesus Christ as He wants to be loved ; and then the 



SATURDAY AFTER THE SECOND SUNDAY. 99 

promise of Jesus is certainly fulfilled to it, and the 
Father loves it because it loves the Son, and be- 
lieves that He came forth from God. 

Here is the place wherein all souls may meet. 
The bravest, the hardest, the tenderest, the most 
timid, — all may do this, all may love Christ, and so 
all may meet in the great home-land and heaven of 
humanity, which is the peace and nurture of being 
loved by God. 

For the Love of God is broader 

Than the measures of man's mind ; 

And the Heart of the Eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind. 

If our love were but more simple, 
We should take Him at His word, 

And our lives would be all sunshine 
In the sweetness of our Lord. 

O Loving Father, Who hast sent Thy Son Jesus Christ to die on 
the Cross for us, give me grace to see in that great offering Thy Love 
for us, and to love Thee through Him by the power of the Holy 
Ghost, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Zbivb Sun&a\? in lent 

They say unto Him, Lord, that our eyes maybe opened. — Matt., 
xx., 33. 

IN every land, clothed with all sorts of garbs, 
with every kind of nobleness and meanness in their 
faces, how the great needy multitude sit by the 
waysides of humanity, where the Lord of Humanity 
must walk! And there is no one of all these needy 
suppliants who has it not in his power to pray a 
smaller or a larger prayer, — to pray a prayer, that 
is, which either asks merely for some endowment or 
adornment of the life, or a prayer which asks for an 
elevation and alteration of the life itself, such as 
shall correspond to the gift of the new sense of sight 
which the Saviour heard the blind men ask at 
Jericho ..." Lord, that our eyes might be 
opened," " Lord, that we might receive our sight! " 
Our sight!" How deep these words are with 
which St. Mark tells the same story ! Our sight, — 
a sight which, though we never saw with it, is really 
ours, — the sight with which we were made to see. 



THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT. IOI 

The consciousness of men who knew that the vision- 
power was a part of their humanity — this, joined to 
the accepted testimony of seeing men that they really 
did see, made these two blind men ready for the 
miracle of Christ. 

This is what makes men believe that they can be 
Christians, and makes them cry out to Christ. The 
world is full of men like them, whom He has saved ; 
and in the depths of their own souls they feel the 
power of being saved, the power of holy love and of 
fight with and ultimate escape from sin. These are 
the things which every man may have ; therefore for 
no man is the cry to Christ impossible. Therefore, 
however men are living prayerlessly or praying little 
prayers, there is no one of them so hopeless that at 
any moment the greater prayer — the prayer for Life, 
the prayer for God — may not burst from his wonder- 
ing lips : Lord, make me a new man ! Lord, give 
me Thy new life! Lord, that my eyes may be 
opened — that I may receive my sight ! 

Not once in all the Gospels is it written that 
Christ passed by a prayer like that, and did not 
answer it. He never did; He never will. " So 
Jesus had compassion on them, and touched their 
eyes ; and immediately their eyes received sight, and 
they followed Him!" . . . 



IG2 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

These men could see. Their blindness had de- 
parted. But how dazed they must have been ! 
How strange it must all have seemed! All their 
seeing life lay before them. Their work was to be 
done. No more sitting in the soft sunshine, under 
the pleasant trees, with outstretched hands asking 
for alms ; no more saying to themselves : ** Oh, 
there is no work for me to do, for I am blind! " 
Strangely intensifying and yet sobering the joy of 
their new vision ! There must have come over these 
men the sense that it was not only light which Christ 
had given them, that all the work of light-seeing 
men, the toil of self-support, the meeting of respon- 
sibilities and duties, must belong to them. There 
was bravery in that ! It was good for them, in the 
flood of the new light which came laden with Christ's 
love, to see also how much there was for them to 
do, what a life there was for them to live. 

And it is good for us. You have prayed the great 
prayer, and it has been answered. The doors of the 
new life have been opened to you, and you are a 
Christian. How good it is for you that on the very 
threshold of that life, and away on to the very end 
of it, it is all thronged with work and duty! 

Do you sometimes almost turn back, and almost 
wish the great prayer had not been prayed ? " Oh, 



THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT. 103 

for the sunny roadside, and the pennies dropped into 
the open hand, and the calm days when no one 
asked of me any duty, and I asked none of myself! " 
But just as two things must have checked in those 
blind men any such low regrets, — just as, whenever 
their foolish, bewildered hearts looked back, they 
must have gazed up at the sun, and then into the 
face of Him who had given them the sunshine, — so 
it must be with you. Look round upon the life 
itself, and see how glorious and beautiful it is, after 
all, for a human soul to try to be brave and pure 
and holy, and full of help to other souls ; and then 
turn and look up into the dear, great face of Him 
who bade you undertake this life; and these two 
things, the essential beauty of a holy life and the 
love of Christ, will drive the baser thoughts away, 
and set the face unflinchingly toward the celestial 
light. 

Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a 
prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not 
wish that you had made it larger. Pray not for 
crutches but for wings! Oh, do not pray just that 
God will keep you from breaking down, and some- 
how, anyhow, help you to stagger and stumble 
through ; pray for His light and life to come and fill 
you, that you may live like Him ; that you may 



104 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

tread temptation under foot and walk across it into 
holiness; that you may be enthusiastically good; 
that you may shine forth with His light on other 
lives; that, whatever comes — and He alone knows 
what is to come, — whatever comes of trial, doubt, 
perplexity, failure, as well as of success and faith 
and hope and joy, it may all work together to make 
your soul fit, first to receive, and then to shine forth 
with, the light of God. 

May God give us all grace to pray that prayer! 

Of what supreme, almighty power 

Is Thy great arm, which spans the east and west, 
And tacks the centre to the sphere ! 

By it do all things live their measured hour : 
We cannot ask the thing which is not there, 

Shaming the shallowness of our request ! 

Almighty God, the Fountain of all wisdom, Who knowest our 
necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking ; we beseech 
Thee to have compassion on our infirmities ; and those things which 
for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot 
ask, vouchsafe to give us, for the worthiness of Thy Son, Jesus 
Christ our Lord. Amen. 



JTDonba^ after tbe ftbirb Sunbap, 

And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto 
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed. 
I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go 
over thither. — Deut., xxxiii., 4. 

THERE must have been in Moses' mind, when he 
thought over his life, a strong consciousness of the 
opportunities of inward and spiritual culture which 
God had opened to him even in and through the 
failure of his plan of life. ... In his repent- 
ance and confession of personal sin, he had come 
nearer to Jehovah than when he received his com- 
mission at the burning bush, or when he abode forty 
days in the mingled cloud and glory on Mount 
Sinai. And now, as the result of all, a patient, lov- 
ing confidence in God; a deep distrust of himself; a 
craving for inner purity more than for any outward 
glory ; a pure, deep love overrunning with gratitude 
for forgiveness, which had deepened with every 
deepening appreciation of the sin, — all this was fill- 
105 



106 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

ing the heart of the venerable man as he went forth 
with God, pondering the failure of his life. 

And this same richness of comfort has come to 
many a man out of the failure of his hopes. You 
come up to the certainty that you are not going to 
accomplish that which you once meant to do, that 
which you might have done if you had not wilfully ' 
sinned. You take your last fond look on the 
Canaan of accomplishment which you are not to 
enter. You say, " I shall never do what I dreamed 
of doing," but at the same time there rises up in 
you another strong assurance, — " God has done in 
me what I do not see how He could have done 
except out of my broken hopes and foiled endeav- 
ors." You are not glad that you have sinned; you 
are sure all the time that, if you could have stood 
sinless, some nobler character still would have been 
trained in you, but you never can think of your sin 
without feeling alongside of it all that God has done 
for you through it. The culture of penitence is 
there, the dearer, nearer sense of God which has 
come from so often going to Him with a broken 
heart, the yearning for an hourly dependence on 
Him, the craving, almost agonizing knowledge of 
the goodness of holiness which only came to you 
when you lost it, the value of spiritual life above all 



MONDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. IOJ 

visible and physical delight or comfort, and a grati- 
tude for forgiveness which has turned the whole life 
into a psalm of praise or a labor of consecration, — 
these are the cultures by which God bears witness 
of Himself to numberless lives that have failed of 
their full achievement. 

But take another thought. The whole question 
of how much Moses knew of immortality is very 
indistinct, but it is impossible to think that, . . . 
in this supreme moment his great soul did not attain 
to the great, universal human hope. It must have 
come to him that this which seemed like an end was 
not an end ; that while the current of the Jewish 
History swept on without him, for him too there 
was a future, a life to live, a work to do somewhere, 
with the God who took him by the hand and led 
him away. . . . And as the scene grew dim 
and misty, and Canaan floated more and more in- 
distinct before his darkening eyes, the vision of the 
other life grew brighter, and the hands which had 
been almost torn away from their beloved labor here 
were reached out, full of the skill which that toil 
had taught them, for their everlasting task. 

And here must always be the final explanation, 
the complete and satisfying explanation of human 
failures. Without this truth of another life, there 



108 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

can be no clearness; all is dreary darkness. A man 
has failed in all the purposes of his life. 
What is there left for him ? He dwells upon the 
culture which has come to him in and from his fail- 
ure, . . ' . but what of Aim, — this precious 
human thing, this single personal existence, the soul 
with all its life and loves ? Is that indeed just 
thrown aside like a dead cinder, out of which all the 
power has been burnt. 

Then comes Christ's truth of immortality. Not 
so! This failure is not final. The life that has so 
fallen short is not yet done. It has been tried and 
found wanting. But by its own consciousness of 
weakness it is made ready for a new trial in a higher 
strength. It has learned humility, self-distrust, 
dependence on God ; with these new equipments it 
will start afresh, and out of failure will come at last 
success. That is the truth which deepest and warm- 
est lays itself on the disappointed heart, and makes 
it glow again. 

And so the whole story of a man's life is not told 
when it is simply written of him that he was found 
unworthy, and did not do the thing which he set 
out to do. Oh, bear me witness, all of you men 
and women who have hoped and failed, that that 
first fact of failure is true of all of us! The only 



MONDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. IO9 

escape from it is in low, poor ambitions that do not 
fail only because they never aspire. But the real 
question is : How does your failure leave you ? 
Are you conscious of culture ? glorying in God ? 
glad to see others do the work which you cannot 
do ? and ready for the new career in the other life ? 
If that be your condition, then your failure is re- 
deemed. The sands will run out unnoticed here, 
but God makes ready a place for that new work 
which has grown possible through the failure of the 
old. " This my son was dead and is alive again," 
He says ; ' ' he was lost and is found. " He tenderly 
buries the old life in forgiveness, and opens before 
the new life the gates of hope. 

To know these truths by heart is to assure the 
richness, the happiness, and the ultimate success 
of life. They are the truths of Moses, but they are 
also the truths of Christ. The song of Moses is also 
the song of the Lamb. May He teach them to all 
of us who have yet our lives to live! 

For to the faithful there is no such thing 

As disappointment ; failures only bring 

A gentle pang, as peacefully they say, 

" His purpose stands, though mine has passed away." 

All is fulfilling, all is working still, 
To teach thee flexibility of will ; 



IIO THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

To great achievements let thy wishes soar, 
Yet meek submission pleases Christ still more. 

O Blessed Spirit, Lord and Life-giver, forsake me not, though in 
my folly I may have grieved Thee. Teach me still, warn me still, 
guide me still, so that I may advance more and more in the path of 
a holy life, until I come to Thine everlasting kingdom ; for Jesus 
Christ's sake. Amen. 



Sues&ap after tbe £birt> Sunba^. 

If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love ; even as 
I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in His love. — 
John, xv., 10. 

There is another word of Christ, spoken on the 
same evening [of the institution of the Lord's Sup- 
per], which we can hardly help taking in connection 
with this. It is that in which He states exactly the 
converse of what this verse declares. " If ye keep 
my commandments, ye shall abide in my love," He 
says here; "If ye love me, keep my command- 
ments," He had said just before. See how the two 
belong together! Love utters itself in Duty, and 
Duty strengthens Love. If Duty grows weak, it 
must climb to the Fountain-head of Love, and 
drink. If Love grows doubtful and hesitates, it 
must lean and steady itself on the strong staff of 
Duty. 

You see how it all points to the beautiful com- 
pleteness of the world, in which there comes no love 



112 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

without its duty, and no duty without its love. It 
is a most inspiring thought, that never yet did God 
put any high emotion in the soul of any of His chil- 
dren that God's world did not instantly stand before 
that child with a duty in its hand, saying, " This is 
the task which belongs to your new emotion. Do 
this task and the emotion shall be really yours; not 
merely the fleeting gleam of a passing sunbeam on 
your bosom, but the settled warmth of a perpetual 
sunshine in your heart." How invariable that is! 
Never does a new love descend from Heaven that a 
new duty d<>cs not spring out of the earth. God 
fills your soul with pity, and the Beggar instantly 
knocks at your gate. God gives you courage, and 
the haunted wretch flees under your strong arm for 
protection. God gives you light, and the cloud of 
some ignorance rolls up out of the night, demanding 
your daylight for its dispersion. 

And if the love hesitates, if it does not see or 
does not like its task, if it prefers to turn its gaze 
inward and feast on its own beauty, if it is content 
with simply loving — what then ? Why, it perishes! 
O you who are to-day wondering where your faith 
has gone, remember ! when God gave you faith, He 
gave you also commandment. On that bright morn- 
ing when you believed something enthusiastically, a 



TUESDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. I 1 3 

duty, something to do, sprang into existence as 
the brother, the twin, of your belief. Did you bid 
them embrace ? Did you give them to one 
another ? Did you say to your faith, " Go, justify 
and confirm your life by doing that " ? If you did 
not, it is no wonder that your faith has faded and is 
almost gone. It is not yet too late; go, run to it 
with its duty as you would run to a starving man 
with bread. Do something with your religion, and 
your religion will not die. 

" As I have kept my Father's commandments, 
and abide in His love," said Jesus; — how graciously 
He uses His own experience to strengthen ours! 
Not even the love which was between the Father 
and the Son, He says, is so exalted as to outgo this 
law, — that duty and love belong together. Even 
the eternal abiding of the Son in the bosom of the 
Father's affection has to feed itself on the Son's 
doing of the commandments of the Father. Who, 
then, are you and I that we should think that ever- 
lasting law can be suspended or restrained for us ? 
Who are we that we should think that in us the 
fire of love can burn without the fuel of duty ? 

O Thou in whom we live and move, 
Whose love is law, whose law is love, 
Whose present Spirit waits to fill 



114 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

The soul that comes to do Thy will ! 
Unto our waiting spirits teach 
Thy love beyond the power of speech, 
And bid us feel with joyful awe 
The omnipresence of Thy law ! 

O God, Fountain of Love and Source of Law ; grant that in obey- 
ing I may know Thy love, and that in loving I may fulfil Thy law : 
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



TKHebnesbap after tbe Gbirfc Sunbap, 

The beauty of holiness. — Ps. xxix., 2. 

Men have debated what constituted beauty, and 
been as far from agreeing on its theory as they were 
unanimous in recognizing its dominion. Without 
entering deeply into the metaphysics of the matter, 
we may say in general that the theories of beauty 
which men have held are mostly reducible to three, 
which may be called the Absolute, the Ideal, and 
the Utilitarian. ... If there be beauty in a 
pure and pious life, shall we not see it unfolding 
itself and answering in its own way to each of these 
different conceptions of what beauty is, so that 
he who judged beauty absolutely, or ideally, or by 
utility, should find something truly beautiful in a 
goodness inspired by the love of God, — for that is 
what we mean by holiness. 

It is a truth that is attested by all the history of 
man living with his fellow-man, that there is in 
human nature a spiritual aesthetic sense which takes 
115 



Il6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

pleasure in the sight of simple goodness, just as 
there is a taste which delights in the beautiful curves 
and colors of material things. It is in man, un- 
tainted and unspoiled, to be stirred into pleasure 
by a pure, good life in a way that will give no other 
account of itself but just this — that the thing is 
spiritually beautiful and appeals to a spiritual power 
in us that apprehends its beauty. . . . It is this 
absolute, self-testifying beauty of the holy Lives which 
has been the strong extensive power of Christianity. 
It is the power of the Sainthoods. There is that in 
man to which they everlastingly appeal. It ought 
to make any man tremble for his own nature if they 
do not appeal to him. If any man pointed to the 
blue winter sky and said, " How beautiful it is!" 
and you could see no loveliness there, you would not 
dare to deny that it was lovely, but would have to 
feel that you were growing blind. So if a holy life 
has no charm for you, it is you and not the holy life 
that is dishonored. You ought to grow anxious, 
very anxious, for your own soul. 

Each of us has in his own heart some outline, 
some suggestion of the best humanity. 
When holiness shines out before us in some holy 
man, it is not something foreign, unfamiliar. It is 
recognized as the completion of what we have 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. WJ 

known so incompletely. It is the fulfilment of a 
thousand prophecies, the ideal after which the real 
in us has been so blindly struggling. Think of St. 
John. Have you never known, as you read his Rev- 
elation, that here, in the great radiance of the spirit 
that surrounded him, was the full glory of those 
stray and sickly beams that through your murky 
atmosphere had fallen on your life ? Just in propor- 
tion as a man has really struggled will he see the 
beauty of the full success. And when a man, 
charmed with the ideal beauty of a holy life, starts 
out afresh, encouraged by the sight of perfectness, 
and dedicates his life anew to God, enthusiastic, 
earnest, all afire with hope — then he is worshipping 
the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 

So holiness in the world helps men. It is not 
merely a light hung out, however brilliant, to attract 
their admiration. The same new sort of beauty 
that the stars acquired when men passed from 
regarding them as merely brilliant spots in space, 
and saw that they could use them, could steer under 
their guidance over the midnight sea, — that same 
new sort of beauty holiness obtains when any man 
begins to see that it is not only a wonderful phe- 
nomenon, not merely an accidental and delightful 
meeting of certain qualities, but may be an inspira- 



Il8 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

tion and a help to him. Close by your side, a 
fellow-man is living a self-sacrificing, patient, godly, 
manly life. You know that it is beautiful ; but 
some day you drop discouraged, and that strong life 
beside you gathers you up and sets you on your 
feet ; or, better still, some day something makes 
you aware that that holiness which you have been 
living with has been helping you all the way along, 
when you never dreamed of it. Tell me, has it not 
grown more beautiful, has not a warmth and dear- 
ness entered into the light with which it shone 
before ? 

In illustration of all this let us think a moment of 
the holiness of Jesus. One thing is sure, that in 
the holiest life the world has ever known men have 
seen also the most beautiful life. All the different 
theories of beauty that men have found are satisfied 
by that supreme excellence of Jesus. The absolute- 
ness of beauty is seen in the instinctive and unreas- 
oning way with which the Life of the Gospels has 
enchained the world's affection. It has found out 
the spiritual aesthetic faculty in man. Children have 
felt its beauty. Theologies have wrapped their 
mists of speculation round it, but lying behind all, 
it has pierced through and found men's hearts, and 
told them of its beauty. 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. II9 

And then the ideal beauty of the holiness of 
Jesus, that, too, has not been hidden. With won- 
derful clearness men are seeing in Him every day 
the perfectness of all their imperfection. " Why, 
that is I, only completely and absolutely pure!" 
the soul says when it sees Jesus struggling with 
temptation, or pitying a sufferer, or going to His 
death in agony. 

And what shall we say about the beauty of util- 
ity ? Every one who has used Jesus knows it, every 
one who has trusted Him in perplexity, leaned on 
Him in weakness, drank of His consolations in 
trouble, clung to Him in the hour of death. That 
is a beauty that will not come out to us perfectly 
till in some other world we shall see how much He 
has helped us, and own His perfect beauty in the 
light of our complete salvation. 

The prophet Zechariah has a strange verse in 
which he tells how he brought the people who were 
entrusted to him to the Lord, — " I took unto me 
two staves ; the one I called Beauty and the other I 
called Bands." Beauty and Bands, Beauty and 
Duty, so God rules the world ! He would rather 
tempt us with His beauty than bind us with His 
bands; it is better to be urged on by the inspira- 
tions than to be driven by the compulsions of 



120 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

holiness. There is a great lack among us of the 
enthusiasm of consecration, the enthusiasm of God. 
When I think how our lives might be psalms, how, 
going on after Christ our Master, we might be filled 
with tile joy of honoring such a Leader and entering 
daily into such a Life, — then these days which we 
do live, even the very best of them, seem dull and 
spiritless. By all your dissatisfactions, by every 
glimpse that you have ever had that you were made 
for better things, I call on you to open your eyes to 
the tawdriness, the ugliness of a worldly life! And 
then before you burns the Beauty of Holiness. Per- 
fectly independent of our temporal conditions, shin- 
ing alike in rich and poor, not quenched by trouble, 
not outshone by joy, visible to God even when no 
man sees it, and at last made clearer and not dimmer 
by the river that we all must cross — that is possible 
for every one of you. In that beauty worship the 
Lord. For the deepening of that beauty in our own 
lives, let us pray and strive and sacrifice everything 
besides. Let sin grow more and more ugly as we 
come more and more into the light. So, here and 
hereafter, we shall have only one wish, only one 
petition, " Let the beauty of the Lord our God be 
upon us." 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 121 

We, too, would wear unspotted 

The garments of the King, 
Would have the royal perfume 

About our path to cling, 
And unto all beholders 

A lilied beauty bring. 

Open mine eyes, O Lord, to see Thy beauty, and seeing it to love 
it, and loving it to follow after it, that so I may come at last to Thy 
heavenly kingdom, to see Thee face-to-face in Thy beauty, O King 
of Kings ; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit art one God, 
world without end. Amen. 



£burs&a\> after tbc Gbii^ SunJ>a\>- 

Rejoice in the Lord, <^ ye righteous, f'»r praise is comely for the 
upright. — Ps., xwiii., i. 

With joy shall yc draw water out <>f the wells of salvation. — ISA., 
xii., 3. 

The Clod of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. — 

Rom., xv., 13. 
There is an old question which is constantly 

appearing in the minds of thoughtful people; — it is 
the question how far the deeper purpose of life- 
needs to be a conscious and constantly remembered 
thing. Is it possible and is it good that in your 
learning, your working, or your suffering, you should 
have present with you the idea that each of them is 
of value for something deeper than itself, and should 
be constantly asking yourself whether that deeper 
something has been reached ? Or is it best that you 
should just forget the deeper purpose, and, perfect- 
ing the form of life as thoroughly as possible, should 
trust the purpose, of itself, to send its power through 
the perfected form ? No man may undertake to 
122 



THURSDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 1 23 

make a large rule which shall apply to all ; but cer- 
tainly to nine men out of ten the ever-constant need 
is of some such thoughtfulness about the final pur- 
pose of life as can only be reached by the great 
Christian truth that man is made to be, and by 
Christ's regeneration ought to become, the son of 
God. 

And one of the clearest places where this need 
appears is in the lack of that buoyancy and fresh- 
ness, combined with and largely dependent upon 
quick, large sympathy, which is so wofully lacking 
in many an intelligent, conscientious, patient man. 
The intelligent man turns into a pedant, the con- 
scientious man turns into a drudge, the patient man 
grovels like a worm. . . . Though we give 
them all our praise, we come in the course of time 
to expect most of the buoyancy and interest of life, 
not from them, but from their opposites, from the 
man who seeks no higher knowledge, who owns no 
rigid service to duty, and who lightly tosses off all 
his burdens. But yet the higher lives, the lives of 
conscientiousness, certainly must be capable of a 
freshness and a buoyancy that is wholly beyond the 
power of any light irresponsibility. God's life is the 
fountain and mainspring of the universe. And what 
the dull scholar, the mechanical plodder and the 



124 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

dogged sufferer need, to make their lives bright and 
their doing of their several duties beautiful, is not 

more levity but more profoundness; not less serious- 
ness, but more. Oh! it seems to me as if there 
were few things in the world that are more sad than 
the dreariness of many good people, who have lost 
the superficial charm which people have, no doubt, 
that live only in the senses, and have not reached 
the true attractiveness of men who are living in the 
conscience and the soul. Their fellows shake their 
heads at them and call them " too good," and in a 
certain ^ciise they are right. These people are " too 
good " for the life of butterflies, but the real secret 
of their dreariness is that they are not good enough. 
They have not reached the central seriousness of 
living, wherein is joy and brightness and perpetual 
enthusiasm. It is the half-seriousness that is gloomy. 
The full seriousness, the life Lived in its deepest con- 
sciousness, is as full of joy as it is full of soberness. 
You leave the earth with its bright flowers behind 
you as you rise; you find yourself among the clouds, 
and then you think how bright the earth was, and 
lament the duty that carries you into such unpleas- 
ant places; but you rise still, and soon, beyond the 
clouds, there are the sunlight and the illimitable 
ether full of peace. 



THURSDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 1 25 

And so I am sure that the peace of any man's 
soul who has outgrown mere self-indulgence, can 
only come by going forward — on into the deepest 
principles and final causes of the things he does. 
Put God underneath all your life, and your life must 
rest on the everlasting arms. 

. . . Because that I have had 
Delights that should have made to overflow 

My cup of gladness, and have not been glad, 
All in the midst of plenty poor I live. 

O God, grant that the Sun of Righteousness may never cease to 
shine within my heart, and to fill me with continual joy. And so 
may the desert places of my nature rejoice and blossom as the rose, 
and the earthly within me be changed into the heavenly, to Thy 
praise and glory, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



]frttav> after tbc Gbirfc Sun&a?. 

He that hath the Son, hath life. — i John, v., 12. 
lie that hearcth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, 
. is passed from death unto life. — John, v., 24. 

LIFE was Christ's favorite word. Life was what 
He was always praising and promising. Life was 
the test by which He tried all the powers that He 
met with. If they nourished and increased life, 
they were good; if they injured and decreased it, 
they were bad. Life was His own claim and cre- 
dential. That He gave man life was the ground of 
His demand for men's allegiance; that He saved 
them from death was the burden of His self-asser- 
tion. He was divine; He was eternal; all vitality 
was at its perfection in Him, infinite, imperishable. 
We should have to be something like Him, catch 
something of His feeling about the beauty and 
gloriousness of life, before we could feel the horror 
which He constantly sums up into that word, death, 
as the mere negative of life. But this we can do, 
126 



FRIDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 1 27 

we can feel how one great difference between Jesus 
and most of the other teachers who have bidden men 
abstain from sin is that while they decried sin be- 
cause it brought pain, or because it hurt other peo- 
ple, or because it destroyed order, or because it was 
unlovely, Christ is supreme in this idea, which runs 
through every word He speaks — that sin is dreadful 
because it is death, because it is so much cut out of 
the world's and the man's vitality, because it is 
destruction of the very essence of manhood, because 
to do wrong as a man is, in so far, to cease to live as 
a man. That is Christ's idea. That is what He is 
always insisting upon when He calls goodness life 
and wickedness death. That was the reason why, 
from the heights of His divinity and thrilling with 
the consciousness of immortality, He hated wicked- 
ness and loved goodness as no other being ever has, 
and why He was willing to die in what we call death, 
if thereby He could save men from that wickedness 
which was the death He really dreaded for them. 

It is hard to over-estimate the change that would 
come to us and our way of looking at life if we got 
thoroughly into us the idea which, it seems to me, 
was beyond all question Christ's idea, and is involved 
in his use of the words life and death. What does 
He mean when He calls goodness life, and wicked- 



128 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

ness death ? Is it a hard and barren statement that 
life is the consequence of goodness, and death is the 
consequence of sin. that God means to kill the 
wicked and save the good alive ? " Goodness is 
life," says Jesus; " wickedness is death." Must 
lie not mean that the essence, the primary idea, the 
deepest meaning of human life is goodness ? That 
was what God made man f<u\ That is his essential 
existence. Not t<> be good, then, to be wicked, is 
to fail of this essential existence; it is not to live, it 
is to die. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die," — is 
that a threat ? Is it not the deep utterance of a 
truth ? Indeed, there cannot be a threat that is not 
the deep utterance of a truth, for no man can per- 
manently suffer except by the eternal necessities of 
things, — not by whim, but by law. Is it not, then, 
as if it said. " The soul that sinneth dies y dies in its 
sinning, dies because for a soul there is no life but 
holiness ? " As a stream that flows no longer ceases 
to be a stream, as the sun that shines no longer is 
no longer a sun, as the tree that buds and blooms no 
more is no more a tree, so the man who has ceased 
to be good has ceased to be a man ; just so far as he 
has ceased to be good, he has ceased to be a man. 

We write upon the pages of our copy-books, " To 
err is human." It has a truth in it, but it is a 



FRIDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 129 

superficial truth. It means that the habit of human- 
ity is to err. Christ comes and says, " To do right 
is human," declaring the profound truth. He means 
that the purpose and nature of humanity is to do 
right. To sin is to fail of human life. That is what 
He surely means when He calls sin death. It was 
the same truth that His Incarnation uttered, put 
into words which were continually upon the lips of 
the Incarnate. 

It is good to turn the truth the other way for a 
moment, and see what it can teach us. " To sin is 
just so far to cease to live," we said, catching 
Christ's idea. May we not also say, " To cease to 
live is just so far to sin " ? There are a multitude 
of useless lives around us of which, when we are 
asked, " Are such lives wicked ? " we reply, " Oh, 
no; they do no harm." We cannot say that they 
do any good, indeed. They are self-indulgent ; they 
have no enterprise ; they have but very little real 
vitality of brain or heart, or even of body. We 
rather hesitate when we are asked to call them good 
lives ; but no ! they are not wicked, certainly. 

But, in the light of what Christ teaches about the 
connection of vitality and goodness, they are wicked. 
Do you remember, in the Parable, it is not for a 
misused but a disused talent that the poor servant is 



130 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

cast into outer darkness ? The young man who has 
refused to use his brain about anything, and so 
stands to-day without a single intelligent opinion 
about those things that are of eternal consequence, 
— the man who does no duty because he has taught 
other men and himself to look upon him as an unen- 
terprising, good-natured mortal to whom they are to 
bring no duties, — the creature who sometimes ven- 
tures to demand our respect for the very qualities 
which make him contemptible, who is conservative 
because radicalism is troublesome and calm because 
enthusiasm is a bore ; — all these, when we see them 
as Christ sees them, we shall know are wicked men. 
The lazy and labor-saving saint is a sinner. The 
man who is not vitally good, is bad, for he is shut- 
ting his heart against the work of Him who came 
that men might have life. 

God teach us all that to be alive is the first con- 
dition of being good! 

O Thou from whom all life doth flow, 

In whom doth life begin, 
Make all our deeds with life to glow ; 

Be nothing dead but sin ! 

Be Thou in us the life to will, 
The eager life to do ; 



FRIDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 

Thy life through all our living thrill, 
And still our life renew 

Till life goes on by life's increase 

To fuller life above ; 
Where life is light and joy and peace ; 

And, best of all, is love. 



13' 



O Lord Jesus, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing and 
the breath of all mankind, to the lifeless impart life, to the living 
increase life : for Thou Thyself art the Life, and apart from Thee 
we have no life. Amen. 



Saturday after tbc £birt> Sunday 

As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath lie given to the Son 
to have life in Himself. — JOHN, v., 26. 

\Vh.»s>iever liveth ami believeth in Me, shall never die. — John, 
xi., 20. 

TllK life Christ gives to us is not a new creation, 
but an impartation of the life which is already in 
Him. Men arc learning to-day that, all through 
the world of physical life, there is never any crea- 
tion of force: it is transmitted and transmuted. It 
passes into new conditions, and shows itself in new 
forms ; but it is always the same essential force still. 
And Religion, rejoicing in this great discovery, calls 
this one force that lives in many forms the Will of 
God. So Christ teaches us that there are not many 
goodnesses in the world, but only one Goodness, 
and that any goodness springing up to-day in any 
man's heartland taking some new, beautiful, strange 
shape, is not a new creation. It is but the trans- 
mitted goodness of the All-good. It is the eternal 
133 



SATURDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 1 33 

and universal light finding its way into one more 
dark corner, and clothing one more hitherto un- 
lighted thing with a color of its own. There is but 
one light in the world — not many, though there be 
a thousand colors. 

It is strange to think how man's mind has always 
held by this idea — that life was transmitted, but not 
created. It has held that to be true of life in all its 
grades, even in the most palpable physical life. 
Man has an instinctive dislike to a notion of spon- 
taneous generation ; it seems to break into fragments 
his notion of vitality. The child's life is a perpetu- 
ation of the father's. Each generation transmutes 
the vitality of the generation before it into some new 
shape. Skill passes from teacher to scholar. Cour- 
age passes from the strong heart to the weak heart 
as they press each other in a human embrace. 
Enthusiasm springs from eye to eye, as the spark 
leaps from one electric point to another. Every- 
where the transmission of life, not the creation of life ! 

And so when a man becomes good, what is it ? 
Not a spontaneous generation; not a sheer leaping 
up of flame as if there had never been any fire in the 
universe before, but a transmission of the Eternal 
Goodness, — a repetition in the soul of that which 
took place in the body when, in the mysterious words 



154 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

of Genesis, " God breathed into man's nostrils the 
breath of life, and man became a living soul." 

Is that conceivable ? Is it credible ? Let us 
understand always that the picture of what Christ 
does for us in our salvation is before us all the time 
in what men do for one another. So long as we see 
men give themselves to one another and the power 
of one man pass into another man's life, so long it 
cannot be unintelligible or incredible that Christ 
gives Himself to us; so long as one illuminated 
object casts light on another, so long can I believe 
that the sun casts his light on them all, — Christ gives 
us His life. Vou cannot give another what you have 
not yourself. You cannot put power into the wheel 
that you turn that is not first in the arm with which 
you turn it ; you cannot put beaut)' in the house 
you build that is not first in the soul with which you 
plan it. It is your strength in the wheel when men 
see it turning; it is your beauty that is in the house 
as men delight in it. And so it is Christ's righteous- 
ness which clothes the righteous soul here, and in 
which it stands, happy and pure and meritless, at 
last. M He that hath the Son, hath life." There 
has been no addition to the total amount of good- 
ness in the universe. There has been only the im- 
parting of His goodness to new beings, the shining 



SATURDAY AFTER THE THIRD SUNDAY. 1 35 

of the light upon new surfaces. For God is infinite; 
He is all the good that is possible ; nothing can be 
added to Him. And when that sweet, mysterious 
change takes place, and the little child or the old 
man becomes holy, it is his turning to God and 
receiving part of the holiness which has been in the 
world from all eternity. It is not a new creation, 
created by his resolve; it is his giving himself to 
Christ, so that Christ can give Himself to him. 

And this gift of Himself has its analogies and 
illustrations in all the ways in which men give their 
lives to one another. Strangely, all these analogies 
and illustrations include another truth which comes 
to its fulness when Christ gives His life to men, — 
the truth of the necessity of sacrifice. If it be so 
(and is it not ?) that constantly men and women can 
give what is best in themselves to other men and 
women only with suffering, then it surely is not 
strange to find that Christ could not give Himself to 
man without a pain that is the central tragedy of 
human history. He could not give Himself to us 
without giving Himself for us. The Fountain out 
of which we were to drink until it became in us a 
well of water springing up to everlasting life, could 
spring only from the foot of the Cross whereon He 
died. That is a deep mystery, but it is a mystery 



136 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

whose faint echoes I find everywhere where man 
gives his life to man, and so a mystery whose wonder 

kindles and does not quench my love. 

Christ gives men life. But the only life He knows 
or cares to give men is goodness. That goodness 
He gives to them by giving Himself for them. So 
the pain of the Incarnation is bound close to the joy 
of the Incarnation; you cannot separate them ; the 
Cross belongs with the Transfiguration. The angels 
who watch in Gethsemane are the same angels who 
sang in Bethlehem, and the life of Jesus completes 
and glorifies the life of every son of God who, trying 
to make his brethren " have life." enters into some 
feeble but real share both of the pain and the delight 
of the Redeemer. 

'T is the sublime of man, 
Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
Parts and proportions of one glorious whole ! 
This fraternizes man ; this constitutes 
Our charities and bearings. But 't is God 
Diffused through all that doth make all one whole. 

O Jesus, the Fountain of all good, the Fountain of life, the 
Fountain of sweetness, the Fountain of grace, the Fountain of eter- 
nal wisdom, most mercifully pour down on me now the gift of 
heavenly grace ; and teach me ever to thank Thee, and to give 
myself up to Thee above all, because this is the dearest offering I 
can make. Amen. 



ffourtb Sunba? in Xent 

Then, on the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the 
place afar off. — Gen., xxii., 4. 

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but 
having seen them afar off. — Heb., xi., 13. 

Think of the power of anticipation everywhere. 
Think of the difference it would make to us if events 
rose above the horizon of our lives with no twilight 
that announced their coming. God has given man 
the powers which compel him to anticipate the 
future for something. The lower animals do not 
have it. They play " regardless of their fate," and 
they walk into the midst of the deepest happiness 
of which their nature is capable with precisely the 
same unhoping, unfearing, unanticipating stolidity 
with which they walk up to torture and to death. 
But when you look at man's life, you feel in a min- 
ute a certain richness of tone, a certain deeper hue 
of life which comes in large part from this — that the 
man is living always in anticipation, that the things 
137 



138 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

which we arc doing at any one moment are always 
bathed in a color that comes from the world of what 
we expect to do, and that the feet are always tread- 
ing with a reluctance or a spring, getting their whole 
movement from something that we can see afar off 
as we lift our eyes. 

Sometimes a great coming joy is seen afar off. 
Every step we take is bringing us to it ; we feel its 
breath upon our cheek ; its light is in our eyes as we 
advance. What then ? When it comes, it will be 
full of education, we are sure. God will have some- 
thing to teach us by it. If we think at all, we know 
well enough what happiness is sent for; we know 
that its lesson is gratitude. We know that God 
means by it to lay a great weight of sunlight upon 
the icy obstinacy of our lives that His bitter winds 
have only stiffened into a harder stiffness, and melt 
it away. But is it for nothing that He lets us see it 
in the distance ? Is it not a part of His culture that 
He allows us to anticipate a coming blessing ? The 
more we look at men, the more we know it is good 
for us to see our joys beforehand. Sudden joy is 
apt to be feverish and excited. We leap suddenly 
into happiness, and it seems as if it were an acci- 
dent. To be sure we call such sudden, unexpected 
happiness a " God-send," but see how the word 



FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 1 39 

has lost its meaning and hardly signifies anything 
but chance. But when a man goes on, day after 
day, week after week, walking straight up towards a 
great delight that stands there waiting for him, the 
excitement has time to die away, the fever can sub- 
side, and a calm, placid, earnest sense of " How 
good God is to me!" comes gradually and folds 
him around. O you who are anticipating happi- 
ness, be sure that you get the culture of your antici- 
pation. It is a great, solemn thing to be happy 
when all happiness — from the joy of health up to 
the bliss of salvation — all means a loving God. We 
are too frivolous about our joy. We think of sorrow 
only as serious and deep. We go tinkling the bells 
that ought to ring with litanies. Humility, trust, 
consecration — these belong in God's intention to the 
happy no less, perhaps more, than to the suffering 
moments of our life. 

Else where would be the culture of a promised 
Heaven ? There is one chapter in the Bible — the 
eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews — 
whose whole burden is that — the power of anticipated 
joy. The old saints are seen, one by one, lifting up 
their eyes and seeing the Place afar off. We do not 
step all at once across the line and find ourselves 
in an unexpected Heaven. It has trained us for 



140 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

itself by promising us itself all the way. God grant 
that we may all be ripening under that culture 
now ! 

But turn the picture: What shall we say about 
anticipated sorrow and suffering ? Before you there 
has risen the image of a suffering that is Cuming to 
you just as surely as the night is coming over this 
brilliant afternoon. It is very far off, but you see its 
certainty. And from the moment you saw it first 
(whatever it is — a disease, or poverty, or the death 
of your best friend without whom life is death for 
you anything that it pierces your heart to think of) 
— from the moment you saw it your whole life was 
altered. You will never again be what you have 
been. 

What are you going to be ? There are three lives 
before you. You may turn away your eyes from 
the coming suffering, and never let them rest there, 
and make believe that you forget it ; but there it will 
be all the time, and you will always know that it is. 
That is the worst and most harassing life that one 
can lead. You may stare it right in the eyes and 
defy it. You may begin to talk of cruel destiny ; 
substituting a superficial fatalism for the superficial 
optimism that has answered your purposes thus far. 
You may try to make yourself hard, and you may 



FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 141 

succeed ; and if you do, your success will be the 
most terrible ruin that could befall you. . . 

There is another way. You may look at it, and 
look tliroiigli it, and find God behind it. What do 
we mean by all the little lines we draw across the 
Omnipotence of Love, and say, " God cannot bless 
me here." There is a patient familiarity with the 
coming suffering that makes a soul, when it comes, 
leap into its arms and welcome it. Such change of 
aspect comes to us not only in the experience but 
in the anticipation of sorrow. " No chastisement 
for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous, 
but afterwards it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of 
righteousness to them that are exercised thereby." 
All those stages of discipline may come while you 
expect suffering as well as while you suffer, if you 
are docile enough; and then when the suffering is 
reached, there is nothing there to terrify you, 
nothing but the " peaceable fruits/' 

There is one anticipation that all must have — the 
looking forward to death. St. Paul tells about men 
who through fear of death are all their life " subject 
to bondage"; dare we call it a foolish timidity? 
Without it where would come out that large power 
of solemnity and sweetness which is in every man's 
nature, but which with nine men out of ten you 



142 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

cannot touch except by some reminder of their 
coming death ? . The truest Christian may 

still shrink from the last agony and the dark grave. 
It ought not to make him doubt his Christianity if 
he does. His understanding of death is reserved 
for him until he can look at it from the inner side. 
Hut do not feel that you ought to dread it. Just 
for that tenor it is shown to you long before, that 
you may lose sight of how terrible the servant of 
your Father is, and even think him beautiful from 
long associating him with the beautiful service to 
which he is appointed. 

I beg you to live far-looking lives. Lift up your 
eyes and see the places afar off. You may not see 
all the way between, but keep your eyes forward 
still. The present cannot be known or done except 
by the future's interpretation and inspiration. And 
no man can know the future rightly except as he 
knows it in Him who is the Lord of all our lives, 

Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever." 

When Abraham came to the place afar off which 
he had dreaded, — the place of sacrifice, — the sacri- 
fice was not needed ; there was the ram in the 
thicket, and the boy was free. It all recalls another 
sacrifice; — Christ dreaded His crucifixion; He saw 



FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 143 

it as He came to it. He did not escape, " When 
they came to the hill Calvary, there they crucified 
Him." But if there was no escape, there was vic- 
tory; " He was crucified, dead, and buried," but 
the third day He rose." In all the places that 
are before us, we shall either be delivered by Christ 
or be conquerors in Christ ; either He will take the 
temptation or the suffering out of the way of His 
servant, as He did for Abraham ; or He will make 
us victors over temptation and suffering, as He was 
Himself. What does it matter which ? Nay, is 
not the last the best way ? Since our victory is 
made sure by His victory, why should we not " re- 
joice when we are partakers of Christ's sufferings, 
that when His glory is revealed, we may be glad 
with exceeding joy ? " 

Our whole anticipation, 

Our Master's best reward, 
Our crown of bliss, is summed in this — 

" For ever with the Lord ! " 

Almighty God, unto whose everlasting blessedness we ascend, not 
by the frailty of the flesh, but by the activity of the soul ; make me 
ever by Thy inspiration to anticipate the things which Thou dost 
promise, that I may be able to perform those which Thou com- 
mandest : Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



flDcmbas after tbe fourth Sun&a\>. 

An angel went clown at a certain season into the pool, and 
troubled the water. Whosoever then first after the troubling of 
the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he 
had. — John, v., 4. 

IT is in general a heavenly element in certain 
Lives that gives those lives the power of expansive 
blessing. This was made supremely manifest in the 
Incarnation of Jesus. There was the human life 
with all its vast capacity Lying so dead and helpless 
till there came into it that which was from outside 
it and yet which was of it — the divine, the heavenly 
element which was above the human, and yet with 
which the human had eternal belongings, to which 
the human was made to respond. . . . And 
this is always the renewal of the Incarnation in the 
personal life; whenever anew the Word comes to 
dwell with any man; whenever Christ, the Hope 
and Promise and Power of spiritual glory, comes to 
dwell in any man, then for that man the miracle is 
144 



MONDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 145 

wrought which was wrought for the world in Bethle- 
hem. The troubled waters of his life are clothed 
with power. His experiences become significant, 
and reach forth, not by distinct determination, but 
by the new, expansive Christhood in them, to bear 
their witness and bring their help to other men. 

What a vast difference there is between the influ- 
ences that two men of marked success exercise in a 
community ! One man's success in business runs 
down like a blight and a discouragement through 
every store in the trade. Another man's succeeding 
is like a trumpet call all along the line. There are 
masters in every profession who make their profes- 
sion seem larger, there are others who make their 
profession seem smaller, because of their succeeding 
in it. Sometimes, in your great woe, you step into 
your neighbor's house, all rich and warm and happy 
and abloom with children, and it makes your deso- 
lation and bereavement easier to bear; then you 
step across another neighbor's threshold, and his 
thronged and lighted comfort smites you like a blast 
out of a frozen sea. ... All of us have had 
times of grief when we have been filled with the 
desire to offer other men the rich cup which we 
knew the Lord was holding to our lips, — times when 
our pain made prophets of us, and sent us abroad to 



146 THK MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

speak the word of the Lord which we felt spoken 
sweet to us in every consecrated pang. A heavenly 
element had come here and there into the sorrow 
which our life has known, an element composed of 
the clear and satisfied knowledge that the sorrow- 
came fr«>m God, and the development by the sorrow 
«.f what was best and most God-like in us; and 
wherever that element was in our pain, whoever 
lias touched our pain has (^und the puzzle of his life 
grow clearer, and the bitterness of his life grow 
sweet. 

The truth, I hope, is clear. It is not every sorrow 
that helps the sorrowing; not every success inspires 
courage; not every joy makes the joyless lift up 

their heads; all these experiences are of the earth 
and earthy, mere pools of water, until the angel's 
touch falls on them, until the heavenly element 
comes into them. Then, as it is told in our parable, 
the waters of the pool are troubled; up from the 
depths of the suffering or rejoicing man comes that 
in which he is the son of God — his faith, his hope, 
his tenderness, his insight. That mingles with the 
divine purpose for which the experience has come 
to him, and in these two lies the power of blessing 
for men's souls. 

One word more. Whosoever stepped in after the 



MONDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 147 

troubling of the waters was cured " of whatsoever 
disease he had" It was not one kind of trouble 
only that the inspired water touched. Whatever 
woe man's poor body could feel this blessed pool 
could cure. And so, to read it into the spiritual 
parable for which we have made it stand, any ex- 
perience of ours, once made helpful by the heavenly 
element, has a strange universalness. It can help 
men who are pressing through experiences totally 
unlike itself. Souls in full tide of joy have subtle 
gospels for the poor discouraged, broken men who 
lie beside the road through which they pass. Un- 
questioning believers have cheer to drop into the 
cup of souls all harassed and distressed by doubt. 
Who has not been surprised by finding that men 
who seemed as far off from him as an Alpine summit 
had sent down streams of help into his life ! This is 
the way in which the single, special life of Jesus has 
helped all the world. All woe is one at its heart, 
and all divine help is one, and so any helpfulness 
in man which really comes from God can be some- 
thing to, can do something for, any possible suffer- 
ing which comes across its path. 

There is no use of living if our lives do not help 
other lives. They must help other lives if in them- 
selves is the power of God. The power of God 



[48 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

comes into men's lives by Christ. To make His 
ours by obedient love — that is the only true way to 
ensure that our lives shall not be useless in the 
world. 

I ask thee for a thoughtful love, 
Through constant watching wise, 

To meet the glad with joyful smiles, 
And wipe the weeping eyes, 

And a heart at leisure from itself 
To soothe and sympathize. 

Wherever in the world I am, 

In whatsoe'er estate, 
I have a fellowship with hearts 

To keep anil cultivate, 
And a w<rk of lowly love to do 

lor the Lord on whom I wait. 

O God, the Strengthener of the soul, I beseech Thee in my weak- 
ness to make perfect Thy strength, that by Thy gracious help I 
may be able to help others, according to the full measure of the 
opportunity that Thou givest me. Grant it for the sake of Jesus 
Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Guesbap after tbe ffourtb Sunbap, 

If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou 
not have done it? — 2 Kings, v., 13. 

Every man who has watched the workings of his 
own life will tell us that the little things he has 
encountered, and not the larger things, are those 
which have tried him most, and before which he 
has most often failed. It is the universal experi- 
ence. The great trials and duties and temptations 
bring their strength with them ; we brace ourselves 
against them by a natural instinct of opposition, and 
are strong; but the small trials and temptations find 
us weak, and bring to us no strength. Something 
comes to try your temper, if that is your weak 
point ; it is a mighty thing ; you can see it in the 
distance as it comes down on you brandishing its 
arms like a giant, and thinking to make very easy 
work of the citadel of your patience, — never very 
strongly guarded, — and what is the result ? The 
gates close themselves against the coming enemy ; 



150 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

you keep your temper perfectly, and are as calm as 
a saint. And the next day some wretched little 
provocation creeps up and steals the keys, and you 
are in a passion before you dream of it! 

Or, think how it is with charity and kindness. A 
strong demand upon your pity and enterprising 
benevolence calls up a chivalrous daring, and sinks 
yourself out of sight, and there is nothing that you 
would not do for a friend in his great suffering; and 
yet the little needs that the same friend brings to 
you in ordinary life encounter only selfishness and 
petulance. I think there are man>- men who would 
go to China for a brother, if lie needed it, who will 
hardly go down the street for him without grum- 
bling, -men who would give up their lives and never 
think of it, but find it very hard to give five minutes 
for a friend. 

And what is the philosophy of martyrdom ? Why 
is it that men, and even women and children, will 
walk fearlessly up to the stake or the scaffold and 
die with psalms on their lips, who had no more 
courage than their neighbors when the little perils 
of ordinary life had to be met ? The martyrs are 
not a separate race. ... In quiet times of 
quiet duties the level of goodness seems to have 
sunk, and we think there can be no more martyrs; 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. I 5 I 

but by-and-by the terrible time of terrible duties 
comes, and men rise to it in a moment, and the 
martyr-spirit is as plentiful and as glorious as ever 
it was of old. . . . It is some secret in this 
wondrous human soul by which it changes at the 
touch of a new emergency into something new itself. 
This makes infinite progress conceivable ; this makes 
heaven possible. I cannot but think that in heaven 
there will be tasks unspeakably harder than any of 
the little trifles we do here, and yet we shall not 
groan over them any longer, but do them with 
angelic ease ; for the heavenly task will make heav- 
enly men with heavenly strength. 

But hozv do the great tasks of life put strength 
into us that does not spring to meet the little labors. 
I think that a large part of the answer lies in the 
way we look at responsibility. Responsibility, or 
the whole thought of being bound, of owing it to . 
God to do a certain act, is easily adapted to what we 
call great duties, but does not so readily take hold 
of the little duties of life ; and so the great strength 
which belongs with " I ought " enters into the 
great tasks, and they are easy ; and it does not get 
into the little tasks, and they are hard. It is not 
hard to conceive that I owe it to the Law of God to 
lay down my life, if it seems needed for the good of 



152 THE M< >RE ABUNDANT 1 ll K. 

some great cause, and I may do it, filled with enthu- 
siasm when that Law of God presents itself to me in 
some of its glowing conceptions; but it is hard to 
believe that the Law of God cares whether I am 
punctual at my daily humdrum task, whether I 
speak kindly or crossly to the child that I find fallen 
in the streets, whether I wrong the tender conscience 
of a poor, stumbling brother who is looking for the 
truth, whether I tell this little lie or not. Our whole 
notion of the Law of God is apt to be too cumber- 
some and stiff. It fits over the whole world like a 
mighty dome, — even a single life may be conceived 
of as so large that the Law of God may fit that as a 

great protecting roof, — but it does not fold itself 

easily about single little actions, and so the little 

actions, freed from the Constraint and felt pressure 
of responsibility, are loose and harder to grasp, — 
harder to do rightly than the larger ones on which 
it presses with a recognized authority. 

Do you remember what St. Paul said? — "What 
the Law could not do in that it was weak through 
the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness 
of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the 
flesh." We have just seen something of what it was 
that the Law could not do ; it could not touch the 
little duties and condemn the little sins of life. It 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 53 

could set itself against the course of terrible, head- 
long crime, but the little faults slipped through. 
The Law was " weak through the flesh," because it 
could not fit itself to the intricacies and subtleties of 
this fleshly life which we live. And what then? 
God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, 
— the personal, human Saviour, who could come 
right into the midst of what men were being and 
doing with a sympathy and knowledge of them 
which, while it is comforting and soothing, is con- 
vincing, unsparing, and condemning too. Instead of 
a vague responsibility there came a watchful Love, 
. . . the presence of the Father in the house, 
among the children, not merely writing upon the 
walls that to do such and such a thing was wrong, 
but showing them that it was wrong by His holi- 
ness, and persuading them not to do it by His love 
— condemning sin in the flesh. 

Here, then, is Salvation. Here is something that 
goes beyond and completes the work that the Law 
could not do, — " Christ is the end of the Law." 
It is the power of personal, discriminating Love. 
Make this, make Him your religion, and then you 
have got something that is infinitely flexible, and 
can fit itself to little and large alike. . . . When 
we do right no longer because we must, but because 



154 TIIE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

He wants us to, and it will disobey and wound Him 
if we do wrong, then ever}- part of the long line of 
duty is pressed by the same force. The smaller 

duties arc as much to be done as the larger, since all 
arc to be done not simply with reference to their 
own fruits, which are insignificant enough even in 
the greatest, but as symbols of gratitude to Him 
who has loved us. Every little chance to do His 
will becomes now an emergency, and so gets all the 
strength of responsibility that used to belong only 
to what seemed the great critical acts of life ; and so 
the little, with this new support, is as easy to do as 
the large. 

This is the salvation by the Personal Christ. This 
is the pure river of the water of Life, clear as 
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of 
the Lamb, by the side of which grows the tree of 
life, with its constant fruit ! 

It may seem a little thing 

That you have to do, — 
A cup of water to bring, 

Or loosen a shoe, — 
But if done with a ready will 
And a loving spirit, still 

It is not little i n you ■' 

O God, the Strengthener of the soul, in my weakness perfect Thy 
strength. 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. T 55 

Thou appointest my work, strengthen me to bring it to a good 
end. 

Chasten my thoughts by attention to present duty, however lowly 
or commonplace. 

Let me be more anxious to be faithful in little than to have much 
committed to me. 

Grant me grace to do all things to Thy glory, and thereby to my 
endless peace. 

I ask it in the name of Jesus Christ our Saviour, in whose name 
we cannot ask too much. Amen. 



TKttebneebas after tbc fourth Sunba^ 

Afterward it yiekleth the peaceable fruit of righteousness. — IlEB., 
xii , 3. 

This shall comfort us concerning our works. — GEN., v., 29, 

WHATEVER may be the special aspect that life 
presents to us, there always is behind it a larger 
purpose of life of which these special aspects are 
only exhibitions. That larger purpose is the Re- 
ception of God by the soul of Man. To receive 
God so that our life shall be filled with His life — 
that is what we are living for. And all that happens 
to us — either the special events which we encounter, 
or the larger, general way in which all life presents 
itself to us — is but the method by which His life is 
to be poured into ours. 

It seems to me that in the deep sense of this truth 
lie both the dignity and the consolation of our lives, 
— the dignity of their successes and the consolation 
of their failures. It is not easy to say which is 
needed most. When men succeed in what the world 
156 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 57 

and their ambitions urge them to attempt, I think 
there almost always comes a certain sense of tawdri- 
ness and worthlessness in the result ; and this sense 
is often keenest in the noblest men, keen and deep 
just in proportion to men's native nobleness and also 
in proportion to the nobleness of the work in which 
they have succeeded. The wise man finds it when 
he has won his learning, the conscientious man when 
he has done his duty, the patient man when he has 
borne his pain. In weak, exhausted moments after 
the victory comes the question whether it is all 
worth while. It seems as if the mere feat of learn- 
ing or doing or suffering were like an athlete's 
triumph, fruitless of real result, and good for 
nothing but a show. Many and many a busy or 
patient man's and woman's life is haunted by this 
sense of tawdriness, this lack of worth and dignity. 
Where can the rescue come from ? If I can learn to 
know that through my learning, or my work, or my 
patience, God is really giving Himself to me and 
making me like Himself, — if then my learning or my 
work or my patience becomes, not something final 
but the doorway through which God comes to me, 
is it not rescued, rescued as the doorway is rescued 
into dignity by the guest who enters through it, and 
makes it forever after radiant with his remembered 



158 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

presence? As the farmer's labor has a dignity which 
the athlete's contortions never win, so the work that 
you or I do for the winning of God has its own 
majesty that work for work's sake can never attain. 

And here comes the consolation of the lives that 
fail, of the parts of our lives which are certainly, 
indisputably failures. If there is a special form and 
an unseen purpose to every life, then there is always 
the hope that though the form of life may be broken 
the purpose of the life may yet fulfil itself in some 
other way, even in spite of — nay, through the break- 
age of — the form. 

Suppose I am one of those men whose ideal of 
life is a perfectly done task, everything fulfilled to 
the uttermost, the ends all folded in the finished 
work, to which no judge in all the universe can find 
a word to say except " Well done." Suppose, with 
this ideal of life, my real life is a failure. Nothing 
is done. Unfinished work, material all spoiled by 
handling and .wrought into no useful shape, is lying 
all around — and that is all ! Is there any consola- 
tion for such a failure as that? Surely none. If 
the work, the finished work, neat, trim, perfect work, 
were the end of it all, then surely there is no con- 
solation. The material is wasted ; there can be no 
repair ; there is no second chance. 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 59 

But if behind the work there lies a purpose ; and 
if God may present Himself to me over the ruins of 
my fallen work as He never could have entered in 
by its stately and well-built gates, and so the pur- 
pose of my life may be attained in all the failure of 
its form ; — then, surely, there is consolation — the 
consolation upon which the bravest and the most 
successful of us, O my friends ! have to fall back a 
thousand times — the promise of repair which, though 
it never can make the breakage of a life seem trivial, 
may prevent it from seeming fatal ; and may make, 
thank God ! a new courage where the old has died, 
a courage full of faith when the courage of self- 
reliance has become impossible forever ! 

Courage ! for life is hasting 

To endless life away : 
The inner life unwasting 

Transfigures thy dull clay. 

Lost, lost, are all our losses ; 

Love sets forever free : 
The full life heaves and tosses 

Like an eternal sea : 

One endless, living story, 

One poem spread abroad ! 
And the sum of all our glory 

Is the countenance of God ! 



l6o THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

O God, Who hast loved me with unspeakable love, give me grace 
to value all things, joys and sorrows, successes and failures, only as 
means of bringing me nearer Thee. Through Jesus Christ our 
Lord. Amen. 



ftburefcap after tbe ffourtb Sun&ap. 

And as He went out of the temple, one of His disciples saith unto 
Him : Master, see what manner of stones and what building is here. 
— Mark, xiii., I. 

A SUPERB utterance of the skill and strength by 
which man can control the physical world, there they 
are still to-day, those giant stones ! They were crying 
out to the disciples of man's power over matter, 
and the disciples were full of wonder at it, but Jesus 
did not care for it. . . He prophesied how 

transitory it was all to prove, and so passed on. 

We need to know that that is always true; we 
who call ourselves the servants of Jesus Christ have 
no right ever to forget that He never is impressed 
by merely material success or power any more than 
He was when He saw them in Jerusalem. . . . 
We see, indeed, that all the spring of marvellous 
energy, all the vitalizing power which made our 
civilization has come in connection with the Gospel, 
and so we are apt to think that what the Gospel set 
itself to do was to give man this power over the 

it i6t 



1 62 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

material world ; but when we undertake to search 
for it, we find that not one word ever fell from 
Jesus' lips which told that this was what He sought. 
If material civilization, — that is, the accumulation 
of wealth, the multiplication of physical comforts, 
the conquering of force to man's will so that it 
leaps the ocean almost with a bound and speaks his 
messages around the globe, — if it could literally stop 
there and go no farther, leave no impress upon char- 
acter, it would make no impression upon Christ. 
He would care nothing for it. 

Does it not follow that, if we are Christians, ser- 
vants of Christ, we too are to care nothing for mate- 
rial success in and for itself ? We let it ruin us and 
oppress us. In our own lives it keeps us struggling 
and working all our days, from our earliest to our 
latest years, heaping up money or providing com- 
forts for ourselves; in our brethren's lives around 
us, we yield to its demands, and render our homage 
to the man who overpowers us with the bulky impo- 
sition of his wealth. If we are really, thoroughly 
Christians, we could not be such slaves. We must 
rise in protest, and insist that these are not the 
things for a spiritual being either to strive for or 
admire. O my dear friends, we are not wholly 
Christ's until some such freedom comes to us. . . . 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 63 

But we have stated only a small part of the truth 
when we have said that Christ did not care, does 
not care ever, for merely material triumphs ; — Christ 
does care for the material, but always with an out- 
look beyond it into the spiritual. . . . Did 
Jesus care for bustling energy and enterprise ? He 
did. Life! life! was what He was forever calling 
out for. But a man full of energy, who fought with 
everything but his passions, and desired all good 
things but character — that sort of man was all the 
sadder to the Saviour for the energy that he pos- 
sessed. Man without spirituality was for Him man 
without that manhood by which the body and the 
mind and the impetuous will are made truly human. 
The time must come when Christian men 
shall refuse to honor capitalists for mere wealth, or 
their age for its accumulation of physical comforts. 
When that time comes, when every material triumph 
is compelled to show some spiritual gain, some con- 
tribution to human character, then how much more 
life will mean ! 

He who looks beyond the material to the spiritual 
which is so much more important — he is the man 
whom mere material success and magnificence can- 
not impose upon. Men come to him and say, 
" Behold, what manner of stones and what building 



164 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIEE. 

is here! " " See how rich this man is! " " See how 

strong this institution is! " " How beautiful this 
art is!" His answer rings out clear and strong: 
" So far as they mean spirituality and make spiritual 

men, I do indeed value them all and thank God for 
them; yet I value them always with a higher value 
for the things beyond. I will let any of them go, 
at an)' moment, if SO I can reach to higher spiritual- 
it}' myself, or make other men better men." 

How free that man is! How he can walk the 
proudest streets and not cringe to the arrogant 
wealth which crowds them! How calm the judg- 
ment with which, looking at them through Christ, 
he dares to form his own independent judgment of 
men and things! 

How can we reach that freedom ? It is only by 
entering into the higher anxieties of Jesus that one 
can be freed from the lower anxieties of men. You 
must care with all your soul that God should be 
glorified and that men should be saved. If you 
can do that you are free. And you can do that 
only by letting God first glorify Himself in you by 
saving you. Let Christ be your Saviour. Then, 
tasting His salvation, your one great wish will be 
that all men may be saved ; and, wishing that 
intensely, you will be free from every wish that 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 65 

does not harmonize with it. That is St. Paul's great 
idea when he spoke of " Casting down imaginations 
and every high thing that exalteth itself against the 
knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every 
thought to the obedience of Christ." 

Nothing so regal as kindness, 

Nothing so mighty as love ; — 
This be the truth that our blindness 

Scatters with light from above, 
Clearing our vision and setting us free 
From the prince of this world, to be joined to Thee 
In a life of rejoicing liberty. 

Blessed Jesus, give me the seeing eye, to look through things 
material to things spiritual ; and the fearless and obedient will, to 
follow Thee all the days of my life. For Thy mercy's sake. Amen. 



Jrifca\> after tbc fourth Sunbap. 

The :-acrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite 
heart, God, Thou wilt not despise. — Ps., li., 17. 

Many things seem to require no law except a law 
of growth. A seed begins to swell with the latent 
life, and thenceforth, till the oak is waving its vet- 
eran glory against the sky, there is nothing but 
continuous development, a straight, unbroken line 
of progress. An egg slowly warms to life, and an 
uninterrupted unfolding of life goes on, vitality little 
by little set free for action till the robin sings his 
perfect song under your window or the perfect eagle 
sweeps his wings across the sun. . . . And we 
should have supposed that for the human soul there 
would be nothing to do but, just like the seed or 
the Qgg, to unfold its latent power, and, by the 
same law of development, to arrive at the most per- 
fect spiritual condition just as certainly as the seed 
comes to be an oak and the egg comes to be a robin. 
But when we look into it a little we see that the 
166 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 67 

seed does not become a perfect tree unless it is a 
perfect seed, the egg does not become a perfect bird 
unless it is a perfect egg. If either germ is imper- 
fect, the fruit will be imperfect ; and the law of 
development, the more completely it works, will 
only multiply imperfection until some hand takes 
hold and changes the wrong direction to a right one, 
and so makes development a gracious and a hopeful 
thing. The law of straight things is just to let them 
grow ; they will grow straight. The law of crooked 
things must be to break and readjust them ; other- 
wise the more growth, the more crookedness for 
ever. Growth for the straight things, breakage and 
readjustment for the crooked things, — those are the 
two treatments. 

The human heart is crooked ; it has got bent out 
of its straight, true line. Henceforth the old prin- 
ciple of growth is not enough. Wrong things will 
grow wrong; the harder they grow the more wrong 
they will grow. Given the fact of sin, the most 
gracious law becomes this new law — the law of 
breakage and readjustment, the law of broken 
hearts. . . . The Gospel is not merely a Gospel 
of supply; it is a Gospel of conversion. 

A broken spirit! a broken and a contrite heart! 
We take it for granted that the means of breakage 



l68 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

must always be some one or other of God's ministers 
>rrow. The words fall of themselves into the 
plaintive undertone with which we speak of grief 
and all its holy offices. But have we ever asked 
ourselves why it should be so ? God never breaks a 
human life or spirit just for the sake of breaking it ; 
lie always has an object. Sometimes, perhaps 
oftenest, His object — the stoppage of a life that it 
may begin anew, and begin better — can be accom- 
plished only through the agency of suffering. The 
blow has to fall; the fortune that a man leaned 
5t SO that he leaned away from God has to 
break down, the child that the mother clung to so 
that she would not see her Saviour has to be carried 
in its coffin outside the house door, before the 
broken heart is willing to strike straight for God. 
Hut are hearts never broken by blessings ? Does 
the sun, with its still and steady mercy, work no 
chemical changes more gracious and more perma- 
nent than the wild winds accomplish ? The storm 
sweeps in some night across your garden, and in 
the morning, lo ! it has wrenched and reshaped 
the great tree, and snapped a hundred little flowers 
upon their stems ; but the real power there is noth- 
ing to the majesty with which, through the still 
summer days, the sun that woke no sleeping insect 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 169 

in the grass was drawing into shape the vast arms 
of forest giants and carving out the beauty of the 
roses' leaves. I believe that much of the best piety 
of the world is ripened, not under sorrow but under 
joy. At any rate, we ought not to talk as if only 
sorrow brought conversion. There is a grace for 
happy people too. Blessed is the soul that for very 
happiness is broken and contrite, turns away from 
its sins, and goes to Jesus with the spontaneous 
and unselfish love of gratitude! Anything that 
makes a man stop and change, and be something 
different from what he has been, is a compelling 
grace of God. 

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a 
broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not 
despise." It is not a demand for a mere senti- 
mental condition, for a vague and wretched disap- 
pointment with life and its misfortunes, but a 
demand for you to accept the great law that in 
every human life there must come a change of direc- 
tion before it can be set towards happiness. If it 
has not come to you, it must come before you can 
be saved. To find out whether it has come or not, 
and if not, then to seek it with your whole heart 
and soul until you get it — that is the one thing for 
you to do. 



I/O THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Blest be Thy dew, and blest Thy fro*t, 

And happy I to be so crost, 

And cured by crosses at Thy cost. 

The dew doth cheer what is distrest, 
The frosts ill weeds nip and molest ; 
In both Thou workest to the best. 

Grant me a broken and contrite heart, God, and renew a right 
spirit within me. 

By joy and by sorrow break and straighten my will, and bring it 
more and more into harmony with Thine. 

Enter by Thy Holy Spirit into my heart, and cast forth whatever 
is displeasing to Thee. 

While I live, let me work Thy will ; when I die, bring me by Thy 
mercy into life everlasting. Amen. 



Saturba^ after tbe ffourtb Sun&ap- 

That disciple whom Jesus had loved said unto Peter, It is the 
Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt 
his fisher's coat unto him, and did cast himself into the sea. — John, 
xxi., 7. 

Here are the types of two kinds of natures ; here 
are two men, each showing very strongly and clearly 
one of the characteristics of humanity. John is the 
type of insight, Peter is the type of action. 
No doubt there is a great deal that forces the distinc- 
tion on us as one of the most fundamental of all the 
differences that lie between man and man ; but it 
does seem to me that we ought to remember that 
there is no essential incompatibility between the 
deepest knowledge and the most energetic action. 
The Bible talks almost indiscriminately about know- 
ing and serving God as the perfect attainment of the 
Christian soul, because knowledge and service meet 
in a harmony which is almost identity in the great 
personal relationship of love. 

We see this very clearly in the relation which 
171 



I72 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Christ's disciples held to Him. They loved Him — 
that is the round and total statement of it. But 
the beautiful thing about it, I think, is to see 
how in that love, completely personal, met, per- 
fectly harmonious, these two great impulses after 
knowledge and after action which characterize all 
human life. I think I see them in His presence; — 
their faces are glowing with that sublime joy which 
tells of new knowledge, of deeper insight into the 
mystery of existence, of visions opening beyond 
visions into the depths of being and of love. Their 
hands at the same time are reaching out for work — 
something to do, some way to utter this knowledge 
that is filling them, some way to print on the hard 
matter of this earth the image of their Lord. 
Dreamers are turning into workers ; workers are 
turning into dreamers. John is opening a Peter- 
nature ; Peter is opening a John-nature. Each, 
while he keeps his own first character preeminent, is 
rounding out upon his meagre side into some devel- 
opment of what at first seemed impossible to him. 
And, by-and-by, when they have been with Him 
long, they have all gathered into their faces a cer- 
tain union of insight and activity which it is hard to 
find in any other group of men. When they go 
forth at His command, it is hard to say whether it 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 73 

is as teachers of truth or as workers of wonders that 
they take gradual possession of the world. 

What Jesus did for His disciples in this regard He 
is always trying to do for us. I think that one of 
the most beautiful treatments which Christ gives to 
our souls is that by which He tries, through every 
kind of discipline, to fill out our deficient Christian 
life with its lacking element. Often this is the 
place in which we are to look for the real interpreta- 
tion of the way in which our Lord is treating us. 
. . . God sends to you His various dispensations, 
touches your life with all the manifold touchings of 
His awful, loving hands. Joy, pain, health, sick- 
ness, doubt, care, disappointment, — all of these and 
all the rest come to you : what shall you think they 
mean ? One thing must certainly be this — that God 
is trying to complete your life, to fill it out to ful- 
ness on its deficient side. 

We are to be more complete in heaven than we 
are here on earth. Will it not be part of the joy of 
that completeness that every soul shall there live on 
both sides of its life, that the thinker and the vision- 
seer shall there taste the full joy of letting his 
deepest knowledge go forth into glad and vigorous 
activity, and the hard worker of the earth shall find 
his work transfigured by seeing how deep were the 



174 TIIE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

unconscious motives which inspired his labor, how 
great and good was the dear Lord for whom he 
worked ? As we wait for that completeness, if we 
always keep it in our sight and hope for it, it will 
not be hard for us to be tolerant or appreciative of 
one another. The man of action may rejoice that 
the man of thought is deepening life ; the man of 
thought may thank God that the man of action is 
widening life. John and Peter may go hand in 
hand and do a work that neither by himself could 
do. 

And what shall each of us do for himself ? Shall 
not these Laws of Life come out of all that we 
have said ? 

(i) Let there be no insight without its work; let 
me count no knowledge of God really won till it has 
helped me to do something for Him or His chil- 
dren. 

(2) Let there be no work without its insight ; let 
me take satisfaction in no active labor, however 
brilliant, however helpful it may seem to men, 
unless there come out of it some deeper insight of 
God, and so some chance to love Him better and be 
more wholly His. 

So shall the great words of Hosea the Prophet be 
fulfilled anew in our happy, growing lives: " Then 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FOURTH SUNDAY. 1 75 

shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord. 
His going forth is prepared as the morning ; and 
he shall come to us as the rain, as the latter and 
former rain unto the earth." 

The thought without the act is vain 
As seed that yields no harvest grain ; 
The act without the thought is dead 
As cinders whence the flame is fled. 

Think well, that when thy thought is grown 

Some noble action shall be sown : 

Act well, that when thine act is o'er 

Bright thoughts may warm thy heart once more. 

O Blessed Saviour, grant that in contemplation I may sit at Thy 
feet ; and in action that I may follow in Thy blessed footsteps 
which went about doing good. Amen. 



tflftb Suirtm? in lent. 

And it was DOW dark, ami Jesus was OOt yet come to them. — 
John, vi„ 17. 

Man's darkness and Christ's presence belong 
together. Darkness — of pain, of mystery, of bewil- 
derment with regard to the true way of action, — 
darkness in any sense demands Christ's presence as 
the completing element, is strange, unhappy, bad 
without Him, becomes natural, serene, healthy, 
hopeful, when it has received Him as its interpreta- 
tion and illumination. That is our truth. 

It is what lie said Himself when He declared 
that it was not the righteous, but the sinners whose 
need had called Him, and when He drew the imper- 
ishable picture of the lost sheep and the longing 
Shepherd seeking for it in the wilderness. So the 
men in the boat on the lake had still something to 
do with Jesus. He was theirs ; they were His. 
Their darkness had in it the possibility of His 
enlightenment. However He did it, — whether, as 
He ultimately chose to do it, by coming to them 
176 



FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 1 77 

walking on the water or in any other way, — the end 
must be that He would come, for they were His and 
He was theirs. Suppose that they had known this, 
how different the gathering darkness would have 
been to them ! How the darknesses of life are 
altered when a man thoroughly knows, as he 
approaches one of them, that in it, because of its 
peculiar nature, Christ will be able to make a revela- 
tion of Himself peculiar and peculiarly precious, one 
which only in such peculiar darkness could be possi- 
ble. New truths of spiritual life come out like stars. 
New depths which the glare of prosperity had sim- 
ply made to shine and dazzle, now open with all their 
distinguished and discriminated richness. And lo ! 
creation widens in the view of the man towhom Christ 
has come not merely in the light, but in the dark. 

You say, " Yes; but this man of whom you are 
talking is the man in the dark to whom Christ has 
come. Speak about the men in the dark to whom 
Jesus has not come. We are such men. The dark- 
ness is very real to us, — darkness of disappointment 
darkness of sin, darkness of practical bewilderment ! 
It is mere mockery for us to hear of men to whom 
in their darkness Christ has come. He does not 
come to us. We have waited and waited, and He 
does not come, — what can you say to us?" 



178 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Two things only. The first is that expectancy, 
the looking for something, for some One who, I 
know, w, and who, 1 am sure, must conic to me at 
last — that is a noble state. Indeed, one learns to 
think that expectation and attainment are not sep- 
arated by any such broad lines as we used to imag- 
ine; they meet and mingle at their edges. While 
the disciples peered into the dark for Jesus, and 
said, through the roaring of the storm to one 
another, " Oh, if He were only here! " was not that 
wish for Him a sort of presence of Him in their 
bo;it ? And so the man in doubt who waits for cer- 
tainty, the man in weakness who cries out for God's 
strength, the man in sin who prays for holiness, 
however the things he prays for may seem to delay 
their coming, has, in the very struggle — the cry, 
the prayer, the hope — the spirit and anticipated 
power of the thing he waits for. 

And the other thing — which perhaps is not 
another, but only the same thing in another form — 
is this : that Christ was with the disciples, not 
merely subjectively in their imaginations, but really 
He was with them all the time. " Jesus was not 
come to them," the story says; but we must know 
more than we know now, more than we can know, 
of the nature of that mysterious Figure which by- 



THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 179 

and-by grew out of the darkness and came across 
the water to their boat, before we can say what the 
real, objective meaning of His coming was. He had 
been with them all the time. His love, His watch- 
fulness, had never left them. When He came to 
them, it was to their sight, their consciousness, their 
comfort, that He came. 

Do you see what this means ? Are you in dark- 
ness ? Do you hear other men in their boats, 
through the darkness, welcoming Christ ? Do you 
say, " Why does He not come to me ? " Never 
cease to cry out for Him until your eyes have seen 
Him, till your hands have touched Him ; but mean- 
while, till then, be sure that, seen or unseen, just 
because He is Christ, He must be with you. Work 
as if, though you could not see Him, you knew that 
He saw you. Be faithful to the Christ who shall 
some day make Himself known to you. Do what, 
if He were in your life, He would want you to do ; 
and then, when at last the curtain is drawn back, 
and you see Him who has been with you unseen all 
the time, His " Well done, good and faithful ser- 
vant !" shall cover all the long days of patient 
waiting, as well as the bright day of eager and 
satisfied sight. 

May God grant it for us all who have to wait ! 



1 80 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Oh, the waiting time, my brothers, 

Is the hardest time of all ! 
But .it last we learn the lesson 

That God knoweth what is best ; 
And with wisdom eometh patience, 

And with patience eometh rest. 
I golden thread is shining 

Through the tangled woof of fate 
And our hearts shall thank Him meekly 

That He taught us how to wait. 

Lord, who art gracious to them that wait upon Thee, be our arm 
of strength in every time. 

Make us to wait patiently Thy time, knowing that all times arc in 
Thy hand. 

Perfect Thy work in us, and let our eyes behold Thy salvation. 

Thine is the blessing and glory, and thanksgiving, and power, for 
ever and ever. Amen. 



flDonba? after tbe ffiftb Sun&ap. 

Then said Jesus unto them, My time is not yet come, but your 
time is always ready. — John, vii., 6. 

Christ's brethren were urging Him to go up to 
Jerusalem and show Himself. . . . Jesus an- 
swers them : No, you can go, but I must not ; I 
have a work to do which binds me with responsibil- 
ities. You, in your lower, less burdened, less 
responsible, less inspired life are more free than I ; 
my time is not yet come, but your time is always 
ready. 

It must have been a sad, but not a strange expe- 
rience to Him. It was simply the point where the 
Higher Nature, with the greater work, submitted 
Itself to constraints and necessities from which the 
lower natures, with their smaller tasks, were free. 
. . . We can think of our lives as set in almost 
anywhere, and made by the ages and the places 
into which they fell into any one of a hundred 
things; but when He said, " Lo! I come to do Thy 



1 82 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

will, O Lord," that consecration bound Him to the 
definite career which the Incarnation introduced. 
For Him the manger at Bethlehem, the road down 
into Egypt, the home at Nazareth, the baptism at 
Jordan, were all waiting. The prophecies, the whole 
prophetic history which had made ready for His 
coming bound Him with golden chains. His con- 
sciousness developed and His will made its choice; 
still there was only one thing that He must choose 
to be and do, — " Wist ye not that I must be about 
my Father's business?" How the sublime com- 
pulsion which those words express sounds in sharp 
contrast with that claim of voluntariness which, as 
it makes the danger, also makes the glory of the 
ordinary boy beginning life! The thing that He 
must do held Him fast from the very first. " For 
this cause was I born, and for this cause came I 
into the world"; so He was always saying, alike 
when He went to John to be baptized, and when 
He stood before Pilate to be condemned. 

When I understand this, when I see how truly He 
was thus constrained because He was Divine, then I 
seem to come into the presence of a thought which 
ought always to be full of the profoundest solemnity 
and comfort. That thought is the necessary ele- 
ment of compulsion in the life of God. We rest 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 1 83 

upon Him not alone in the possibilities but also in 
the impossibilities of His life, — whatever comes, 
whatever men may choose to do or be, He can never 
be anything but just and good and holy. All our 
unanswered prayers, all our wild wishes that are not 
fulfilled, all the delays of consolation and relief, — 
they all cease to be utterly bewildering and exas- 
perating when we know and hourly remember that 
every one of them goes up into the presence of a God 
who is as full of the compulsions of wisdom and holi- 
ness as He is of the impulses of love. . . . By- 
and-by we come to know, through many experiences 
which almost broke our hearts as we received them, 
but which we now thank God for in our most grate- 
ful prayers, that a million disappointments of our 
wishes are a cheap price enough to pay for the con- 
viction rooted and grounded immovably at the very 
bottom of our souls that God must do the right, 
that however He may love a child of His, He can- 
not for that child do anything that is wrong, or 
leave anything that is right undone. 

All this was at once manifested and deepened in 
the Incarnation. The Bible never hesitates to 
speak of the surrender of freedom which the Incar- 
nation of Christ involved as part of the true sacrifice 
which He made for us. . . . And so those 



184 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

chains which the will of Christ to save us bound 
around the freedom of His life, become perpetual 
witnesses not only of His love but also of our sin. 
Terrible indeed must be the wickedness of a world 
into which its Maker and Master cannot come 
except through the door of deprivation and con- 
tempt ! 

And yet He came! And so the sacrifices which 
He made are signals also of His hue. And they are 
witnesses also of this, which all men must learn who 
shall at any time undertake to walk in the footsteps 
of Jesus, and do something for the salvation of their 
brethren — that every attainment of usefulness, of 
real, saving power, can come only by the restriction 
and sacrifice of freedom. He who will in any 
degree become a saviour must see other men go up 
to the feast while he lingers behind; must wait 
until his hour comes; must be, among the men that 
he would save, " as one that serveth " ; must gird 
himself and wash the feet of those whose souls he 
wants to save. Thank God the lesson has been an 
easy one for multitudes of men and women to learn 
since it was written in the Face of Christ ! Thou- 
sands have leaped, as to the gospel for which their 
lives were thirsty, to the great truth which they 
read there — that the exaltation of nature, while it 



MONDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 1 85 

means freedom of soul, means restraint of action ; 
and so they have taken up the bounded and limited 
life which lay before them, as the symbol and wit- 
ness that they had entered by the new birth into the 
full liberty of Christ. 

So, let him wait the instant men call years ; 
Meantime hold hard by truth, and his great soul 
Do out the duty. 

And Duty opens wide the door 

By which Love enters free, 
The Love whose rule is largest life 

And purest liberty. 

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who, being Infinite, didst for our sake deign 
to encompass Thyself with limitations ; curb our hearts, wills, 
imaginations, desires ; that law and instruction may be our orna- 
ment of grace and chains of dignity, and that Thy service may be 
our perfect freedom. Amen. 



£uc9&a\> after tbe jfiftb Sunbag. 

My time is not yet come, but your time is always ready. — John, 
vii., 6, 

OUR text speaks not merely of the constraint of 
the higher nature, but also of the freedom of the 
lower. Where Christ was bound, His disciples, as 
Living lower lives and bearing lower responsibilities 
than His, were free. . . . We can consider 
them, we can consider ourselves, remember, in two 
different ways. In one view, we are workers with 
Christ, we are called upon to share His nature, and 
so we enter into all the restraints of freedom which 
belong to Him. In the other view, we are beings 
for whom He is working; He takes the responsi- 
bility off of our shoulders; we have but to let Him 
do for us that which He is all ability and willingness 
to do. 

If we for one moment separate, then, the second 
thought, the thought of the freedom from care 
which belongs to the lower life, led and watched 
over by the Higher, see how rich it is! The Lord 

186 



TUESDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 1 87 

said to His disciples, " Go up to the feast now; I 
am not ready yet." Enough for you, He seems to 
say, that I keep in my anxious heart the plan of the 
great work which must be done ; enough that I 
accept its constraints and bow to its necessities. 
You have only to go upon your way and do your 
duties as they come to you, and I will see that they 
are all wrought into the great system, and make 
their little part of my complete success. 

Do you not see the parable ? There is one great 
and welcome view of life in which we have a right 
to think that God commands us just to go on and 
do our clear duties, and He will see that they work 
out completely ultimately in the great design. . . . 
When the whole great design grows dim before us, 
when we find it hard to trace any great purpose run- 
ning through this snarl of life, when doubt of the 
great consummation makes us weak, oh, how 
strength comes to us from the conviction of the 
freedom of the lower nature! Then, just to go on 
and do our duties one by one, even without know- 
ing where they are leading us ; to make to-day's 
hard march, to fight to-day's hard battle, and leave 
the great campaign where it belongs, in the wise 
Captain's hands, — there is the only comfort, the 
only light, which oftentimes seems left to us; and 



iSS THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

when we take it in profound humility, behold! it is 
enough. Doing the duty that we sec. Living by the 

truth we know, His promise is fulfilled to us, — we 
l\o not walk in darkness, but we have the light of 
life. 

It seems to me that we can have no better picture 
of the life that we are called upon to live than in 
the thought of Christ's disciples after they had gone 
up to Jerusalem, and while they were waiting there 
for Christ to come. They were there because He 
had sent them, and the)- knew that, bv-and-by, 
when He arrived, they would understand what it all 
meant, why this great Feast of Tabernacles should 
be held, and why they should take part in it, and 
what new, better thing was to grow out of it. 
Meanwhile they did their part in the great ceremony 
like the Jews, waiting for Christ. And so we often 
seem to have come where we are, into the tasks 
which we have to do, into the truths which we 
believe, sent there by Christ; and we are waiting 
for Christ to come up to the feast and put His full 
life into what yet seems to be only half-filled, dimly 
filled with Him. Our souls, our hearts, cry out, 

Come, Lord Jesus! Come, and make all truth 
clear; come, and make all duty rich and easy with 
Thy love ! ' ' 



TUESDAY. AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 1 89 

What shall we do until He comes ? Not blame 
Him or complain of His slowness, know always that 
His higher nature must have constraints and delays 
which ours cannot understand, rejoice that even 
now we may have the light that comes of knowing 
that we are where He has sent us, and then work 
and believe, — work as courageously and cheerfully 
as possible, believe with all the faith we can, — but 
do both with our eyes always fixed upon the gate 
by which, when His time shall be ready, He shall 
enter into His temple and complete our life. 

. . . For I have learned by knocking at Heaven's gate 
The meaning of one golden word that shines above it, " Wait ! " 
For with the Master whom to serve is not to ride or run, 
But only to abide His will, " Well waited is well done." 

Grant to me, O Blessed Lord Jesus, patience in waiting for Thee, 
and diligence in working for Thee ; and that in doing both my heart 
may be filled with such loving trust in Thee that the waiting shall 
not seem long, nor the work hard ; so that both shall be done to Thy 
glory. Amen. 



lUctmc6t>av after tbc fifth Sunba?. 

Behold, we go up to Jerusalem. — Mark, x., 33. 

EVERY yearly Passover Jesus went up to the 
national temple, and while lie was there He taught 
some of His profoundest teachings and did many of 
His most significant and mightiest works. 
The going to Jerusalem becomes a habit, and in 
that habit the labor of His life finds its inspiration. 
The life that has been consecrated in the city of 
God, and then educated in the city of God, now 
works in the city of God. It labors in Jerusalem, 
and its labors become but the utterance of the 
nature and will of the King in whose kingly city 
they are done. Not now in one single act, but in a 
continuous resort thither, which represents the con- 
tinual need and allegiance of all His life, Jesus goes 
to Jerusalem that His work may be filled with the 
meaning and the glory of the Divine Light whose 
symbolical earthly dwelling-place was there. He 
talks with Nicodemus, and cures the cripple, and 
190 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 191 

forgives the wretched woman, and raises Lazarus, in 
or close by the city of God, that the wisdom, the 
health, the forgiveness, the new life, may be seen 
and declared to be the gifts of His Father, who is 
King of all. 

Now, is not the perpetual meaning of these visits 
clear ? Do we not see the way in which they are to 
be repeated in all our life ? Beyond our first con- 
ception of ourselves as God's children, — beyond our 
education under Him, so that our ideas shall take 
His color, — something more is needed. Our daily 
work, the constant occupation of our life, needs to be 
done in His presence, and to be shone through and 
through by Him. Often it is the hardest part of our 
religion. It is comparatively easy to keep hidden 
away in the most sacred and secret chamber of our 
soul the general consecration of our life to God, 
easy, comparatively, to shape our thought after 
what we know of Him, but our work — these things 
which we have to do day after day for our living, 
these things which we have to do as merchants, 
scholars, lawyers, clerks, school teachers, house- 
keepers, mechanics, — to do all these in Jerusalem, 
under God's kingship, as His servants, so that His 
light shall shine through them, and men shall see 
not us or our act alone, but Him, — that is the per- 



I92 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

petual hardness of the Christian life. Unselfishness 
and elevation — those are the qualities that make the 
transparent beauty of an act done in Jerusalem, 
done in the sight and love and loyalty of God. 
Even our most gracious actions, even our help of 
our fellow-men, done out of Jerusalem, done out- 
side of a presently apprehended love of God, are 
clouded with s<»me sort of selfishness and sordid- 
ness. They become perfectly clear in us only as 
they were perfectly clear in Christ, by being done, 
every one of them, in the immediate presence of 
God, out of desire to serve Him, and to show Him, 
and to make I lis will succeed. I am sure that if we 
contemplate them carefully, we shall see that this is 
the real essence of the difference between Christ's 
Christian life and ours. Our life is lived in a gen- 
eral consecration to God, but with Him every act is 
conscious of God and filled with Him. So selfish- 
ness and sordidness are utterly absent in His life, 
but they are always showing themselves in ours. 

It is good to go for work to the Holy City to 
which you have already gone for consecration. It 
is good to bring every special act, to do every 
special duty, within the light of that motive to 
which your life as a whole is given. Fill your 
cheapest action with the enthusiasm of your best 



WEDNESDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 193 

desires and hopes, let your most commonplace work 
be part of the same consecrated life with your brav- 
est heroism, as the drummer-boy is part of the same 
army with the general. That is the true secret of 
noble life, and that is the lesson of Christ's working 
visits to Jerusalem. 

And everywhere, here and always, 

If we would but open our eyes, 
We should find through these beaten footpaths 

Our way into Paradise. 

Dull earth would be dull no longer, 

The clod would sparkle — a gem ; 
And our hands, at their commonest labor, 

Would be building Jerusalem. 

Almighty and merciful God, into whose gracious Presence we 

ascend, not by the frailty of the flesh, but by the activity of the soul : 

make us ever, by Thy inspiration, to seek after the courts of the 

heavenly City, and, by Thy mercy, confidently to enter them, both 

here and hereafter. Amen. 
*3 



Ebure&a? after tbe jfiftb SunJ>a\>. 

For Jesus ofttimes resorted thither with His disciples. — John, 

xviii., 2. 

THESE words occur in the story of the night 
before the Crucifixion. Jesus hail eaten the pass- 
oxer supper with His disciples, and after it was over 
He went out with them, and having crossed the 
brook Kedron, He entered the Garden of Geth- 
semane. It was old, familiar ground to Him. 
Main- an experience was already associated with 
that bit of grass and those old olive trees. He had 
thought and prayed and suffered there already, and 
when He saw a new experience approaching, and 
that the greatest of experiences, the very crisis of 
His earthly life, His steps turned back to the old 
haunt. It was as if He rested and steadied Himself 
upon all His previous experience as He undertook 
His final work of suffering and death. 

It is good for us to know this; it is good for 
Christians to understand that it is by the life as well 
194 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 195 

as the death of Jesus that their souls are saved. 
The power of the Cross was that same power which 
had been in all the life which led up to the Cross. 
All through that life of the God-man, God had been 
giving Himself to man in love ; man had been giving 
himself to God in obedience. So we want to find 
in every life the true relation between its quiet, 
uneventful periods and the critical moments which 
here and there break through its calmness. It is 
possible so to live that the great moments of your 
life shall not be wild convulsing meteors or tempests. 
Men have learned that tempests and meteors are but 
the culminating points of processes that are at work 
upon the calmest days. It is while you are doing a 
thousand little duties in the fear of God that you 
are slowly growing into familiarity with Him. It is 
while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of 
life that the meaning and shape of the great whole 
of life dawns upon you. It is while you are resist- 
ing little temptations that you are growing strong. 
Character, by the very necessities of its nature, 
cannot be made except by steady, long-continued 
process, by pressure after pressure and blow after 
blow. 

Such a truth seems to put dignity into the 
uneventful moments and years of life. It redeems 



I96 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

the monotony of living. You say: " I am doing 
nothing, nothing but running this weary round, 
nothing but finishing one day only to begin another. 
How dull and dreary life is! " Oh! it is not dull, 
and it need not be dreary, if it is making you know 
God, and know yourself, and grow good. Some- 
time the even level will be broken up; sometime the 
crisis will arrive. Your life will not always be 
uneventful. Perhaps the tempest and the battle are 
to come to-morrow ; perhaps they are yet long years 
away. What does it matter ? They are sure to 
come; — at least the great event that comes in 
every life will come to you — that event which 
we call dying. No life is so vulgar and mean 
but that it arrives, sooner or later, at the dignity 
of death. The crisis will come, but the power of 
the crisis is here and now, in these days which you 
are ready to call dull and insignificant. Oh, if 
you could see how they are all burdened with criti- 
calness! 

The ship is out on mid-ocean; and it is midnight, 
and the storm is wild. The winds are savage, and 
the sea is terrible. We say the ship is struggling 
for her life. But, tell me, where was the real strug- 
gle of that vessel ? Was it not long ago upon the 
hillside where her timbers grew, and in the shipyard 



THURSDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 1 97 

where her nails were driven ? Then it was decided 
whether she was to go to the bottom, or come safely 
to her port. So, as I look forward, I can see you, 
on some day in the years to come, wrestling with 
the great temptation or trembling like a reed under 
the great sorrow of your life, a temptation or a sor- 
row of which you have, as yet, no conception. 
That crisis may be years away. But the real strug- 
gle is not then, but now — here, on this quiet day 
and in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided 
whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or 
temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously 
conquer. 

Christ is the Son of God, the Interpreter of life, 
the Giver of character; if you are His, His strength 
is entering into you ; no moment of your life is 
insignificant. Each least act opens some new cor- 
ner of your nature and appropriates Him a little 
more fully ; and all that He is doing for you now 
shall be made known at last. To-morrow or next 
year, or years hence, or an eternity away, when the 
test comes, when the blow falls, you shall be more 
than conqueror through Him who is becoming your 
Christ now. Therefore take courage, and every 
day give yourself to Him that He may give Himself 
to you. 



I98 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

We stride the river daily at its spring, 

Nor, in our childish thoughtlessness, foresee 

What myriad vassal streams shall tribute bring, 
How like an equal it shall greet the sea. 

O small beginnings, ye are great and strong, 
Based <>n .1 faithful heart and weariless brain ; 

Ye build the future fair, ye conquer wrong, 
Ye earn the crown, and wear it not in vain. 

O God, Who hast made us in Thine own Image and Likeness, and 
hast placed that before us perfectly in the life of Thy dear Son ; give 
us strength and determination to act habitually as in Thy sight, 
according to Thy will : through Jesos Christ our Lord. Amen. 



f ri&ap after tbe fftftb Sunbap. 

For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all 
things, in bringing many sons into glory, to make the Captain of 
their salvation perfect through suffering. — Heb., ii., 10. 

It is not every sort of suffering that trains the 
souls of men. Simple suffering, taken by itself, has 
never any such educating power ; it gets it only by 
the strength of some end or purpose that is discov- 
ered in it. The man who has suffered much, and 
yet who knows nothing of suffering but its pain, is 
hard and not soft ; is selfish, querulous, ungrateful. 
The blows have beaten his outer nature into a crust 
to keep the inner life more than ever a prisoner, 
instead of breaking the outer life to let the inner life 
forth. 

What, then, must we put into suffering to make 
it a true means of education ? Two things : First, 
hearty and cordial submission to another's will. 
Look at the child who patiently submits because his 
father says not, " You must," but It is well you 
should." Look at the men and women everywhere 
199 



200 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE, 

who have no question after they have found out 
what God's will is, who simply go and do it, in 
whatever pain, because they know it must be right 
and best that His will should be done. In all such 
cases, where suffering conies out of willing submis- 
sion to a superior and trusted will, it brings the 
sufferer into sympathy with the purpose of that 
will, it demands spiritual enterprise and faith, and 
SO it calls out the better life and educates the soul. 

There is another thing which you must add to 
suffering to make it a means of perfection. It must 
be the suffering not merely of faith, but of love. 
No man grows the best by what he suffers only for 
himself. There is not half as much spiritual culture 
in the pain of fewer that tosses on the sick bed, sub- 
missive as it may be to God, as in the pain of sleep- 
lessness and anxiety that watches by its side and 
not merely submits to God, but suffers for love of a 
fellow man. All the highest and most educating 
suffering of the world has been vicarious. It has 
been the suffering which the sufferer was in no way 
bound to bear, save as Jesus was bound to die for 
our sins, " for the great love wherewith He loved 
us." 

Put both of these elements in, and then you have 
the perfect and the perfecting suffering. This is 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 201 

what makes sick-rooms sweet and martyrdoms glori- 
ous. The life is not hardened and crusted by the 
hammer of agony, but broken for the escape of its 
better and more spiritual portion by the buoyant 
and elastic blows. 

In all the sufferings of Jesus both these elements 
supremely met. You know how solicitious He was 
everywhere to tell the world that He is no volun- 
teer, unauthorized Redeemer, that He is doing 
what He does in submission to a Great Eternal 
Will. This is the tone of everything, — " Not Mine, 
but the Father's that sent Me." One meaning of 
this surely is that Christ, by this continual submis- 
sion of His will to Deity, was helping forth the Deity 
in His own nature to full consciousness and power. 
. . . Even men have felt, when they suffered 
supremely in submission to God, that their submis- 
sive souls sprang into freer sympathy with God and 
understanding of His plans ; what, then, must it 
have been for Him who was God, self-clouded in 
humanity for awhile, when, submissive to the God- 
hood in His suffering, the cloud broke from Him, 
and the long exile was finished, and the Divinity of 
the Son swept through the encumbrance of the 
human life and laid itself close to the Divinity of 
the Father! 



202 Till-: MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

The other perfecting element of suffering is also 
plentiful in the suffering of Christ, — He suffered for 
love to others, not for Himself. " To seek and 

save that which was lost, To call the sinners to 

repentance," " Lifted up to draw all men unto 
Him," " Lifted up that whosoever believeth on 
Him should not perish, hut have everlasting life," 
— take the love for men out of the life of Jesus, and 
it is as if y<>u had taken the sun out of the sunlight. 
Docs it seem strange to say that it was this 
suffering for His brethren which softened and 
unfolded the human life of the Redeemer, that the 
Divine nature might become more manifest and 
active ? It is but the self-same law which decrees 
that only when men suffer for other people do they 
do their best, and bring forth into their own con- 
sciousness and into the sight of other men the high- 
est nature that is in them. 

It pleased Him to make the Captain of our salva- 
tion " perfect through suffering." This, which we 
have been trying to define, we hold to be one mean- 
ing of this wonderful phrase. I do not say that 
there may not be other meanings; but this, at least, 
is there — that the Divine Jesus ripened and devel- 
oped into more perfect knowledge and use of His 
Divinity. If we cannot without some sense of vio- 



FRIDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 20j 

lence transfer the scene at the Last Supper and the 
scene by the lake of Tiberias to the earliest years of 
Christ, must not the reason be that Christ was made 
perfect for them only through the sufferings that 
came so abundantly to Him in His submission to 
His Father, and His love for His brethren ? 



It is idle to talk of suffering as if it were the priv- 
ilege of a few select lives only. Suffering and its 
culture, like joy and its culture, are within the lot 
of every man. He lives unworthily whose nature 
never clashes against the lower natures, and suffers 
pain. But mere pain is not education, does not 
bring growth. It is the suffering of willing submis- 
sion to God and of self-sacrificing love for fellow- 
men that softens and spiritualizes and blesses us. 
In all such suffering let us rejoice. We shall not 
need to seek, opportunities enough for it will meet 
us everywhere. And may God help us everywhere 
to find the treasures they contain ! 



We take with solemn thankfulness 
Our burden up, nor ask it less, 
And count it joy that even we 
May suffer, serve, or wait for Thee, 
Whose will is done. 



204 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

O my God, by whose loving Providence sorrows, difficulties, trials, 
dangers, become means of grace, lessons of patience, channels of 
hope, grant me good will to use and not abuse these my privileges ; 
and of Thy great goodness keep me alive in Thee through this dying 
life, that out of death Thou mayest raise me up to immortality : For 
His sake who is the Life, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



5atur&a$ after tbe jfiftb Sunba^ 

And Jesus entered into Jerusalem. — Mark, xi., n. 

THERE remains yet one more entrance of Jesus 
into the Holy City, the most solemn of them all. 
It was His last. He never came into those streets 
again. And now He came to be condemned and 
die. His sacrifice for man and the culmination of 
His sufferings were before Him, — Love, self-devoting 
Love and pain. And for both of these He comes 
up to Jerusalem. " It must not be that a prophet 
perish out of Jerusalem." He had served His 
brother-men everywhere, but when His supreme 
service of them comes it must be in God's city. He 
had suffered everywhere, but when His supreme 
suffering comes, that, too, must be where His 
Father's presence is most manifestly declared, in 
the City of God. It is the acceptance of the claims 
of men, and the need of suffering as included in, 
and impressed upon Him by, the will of God, — it is 
this that is signified by His last visit to Jerusalem. 
205 



206 THE MORE Al'.i NDANT l M E. 

And so this visit, like the rest, comes home to 
us. The impulse to help men, to save men if we 
can, is universal. Wry feebly in most souls, but 
very strongly in some, and with some kind of flut- 
tering in all, the wish to help and save our brethren 
is in our hearts. From the mere impulse of easy 
good nature it ranges up to the passion of the eager 
philanthropist. . . . There is the help which 
men give to brother nun, the sacrifice which men 
make for brother men, purely for themselves; and 
there are the help and sacrifice which are given and 
done in the love and name of God The depth and 
tenderness and constancy of men s relations to each 
other is completed when men know one another as 
the children <>f God, and live for them and, if need 
be, die for them, as brethren in Him, — only then. 
The deepest natural affections need to be taken into 
the City of God before the)- come to their best. 
They must be consecrated by religion. The 
mother's love for the child, the child's duty to 
the mother, the friend's friendship for the friend, 
the citizen's devotion to his country, the man's 
enthusiasm for humanity, — they all grow hard and 
rigid unless they are kept bathed in the soul's 
love of God. When you have any task to do, 
any sacrifice to make for your fellow-men, do not 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 20J 

try to do it till you have first put yourself and him 
where you both belong — into the family of God. 
In the rich atmosphere of divine consecration, the 
cross on which you give yourself for fellow-men 
shall grow light as your Saviour's did, and it shall 
be very easy to lift it, very easy to be lifted on it. 
When you are called upon to share any part of the 
Saviour's great work of saving the world, go where 
He went to do it — into Jerusalem, the City of God. 
And this is true of the other purpose which 
brought Jesus there on His last visit. He had 
pain to suffer, and He came up to Jerusalem to bear 
it. Pain borne outside of the presence of God, not 
as His gift, not with His sympathy, is hardening. 
Pain borne in His love and with His help is the 
soul's salvation. How great the difference is when 
that line is crossed ! A man is suffering one day all 
by himself, and he is growing more bitter and hard 
all the time; hard, stern, selfish, that is what his 
suffering makes him. The next day it has come 
into his heart, and gone all through his nature, that 
he is God's child, and that his suffering has come to 
him not outside his Father's love. Behold the 
difference ! Every best part of him now feeds upon 
his pain, and " life is perfected by death." Oh! 
there is nothing in the world so sad as to see men 



208 THE MOKE ABUNDANT LITE. 

and women suffering without God, nothing so noble 
as have been the sights which the world has seen of 
men suffering where Christ suffered — in obedience 
to the will and in the comfort of the love of God. 
If God calls upon you to suffer, go where your 
Saviour went for His sufferings, into the Holy City 
where God is most manifest : and so, and tkere t 
your suffering shall be to you what His suffering 
was to Him — the crown, the completion, the suc- 
cess of His life. 

Some men used to believe that the city of Jeru- 
salem was Literally the centre of the earth ; they 
drew their maps with all the rest of the world spread 
in a circle round that point. Have we not seen 
what is the spiritual truth which such ideas con- 
tained ? The true life must always be going up to 
the City of God. It must go there for its first total 
consecration. It must go there for its education. 
It must go there for its work. It must go there to 
catch sight of the promised victory. And at last it 
must go there for its final sacrifice and pain, which 
bring the end and the victory. Under every variety 
of circumstance we go up to Him, and the gates of 
God are always open to us. He takes us in our 
sorrow and our joy, in our triumph or our shame, 
and every mood and time of life come to their best 
only as they enter into Him. 



SATURDAY AFTER THE FIFTH SUNDAY. 209 

I am not glad till I have known 
Life that can lift me from my own ; 
A loftier level must be won, 
A mightier strength to lean upon. 

And heaven draws near as I ascend ; 
The breeze invites, the stars befriend ; 
All things are beckoning towards the Best : 
I climb to Thee, my God, for rest ! 

O God, in the time of suffering and sorrow give us grace to come 
to Thee for help ; that being strengthened by Thy Spirit, we may be 
enabled to rise above our pains, and abide in the peace of Thy love 
and pardon : Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Siytb Sunbap in lent 

And when IK- was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, 
saying, Who is this? — M ATT., wi., i<>. 

If we leave out His enemies, those who concluded 
that Christ was merely an impostor or a wild enthu- 
siast, it will be easy to distinguish three classes in 
that crowd <»f Jerusalem, giving three different 
answers to the question that was tossed from 
tongue to tongue, " Who is He?" 

" Do you not know?" cries one. " It is the 
great wonder-worker out of Galilee." And then 
with fluent tongue and glowing face he hurries on 
to tell of all the miracles that he has seen, — of how 
the blind man down at Jericho received his sight, of 
how the lunatic at Gadara was cured, of how the 
dead man here at Bethany came back to life; — all 
that the Lord had done, all His mighty works were 
told. " Let us follow Him, and see what more 
strange works He will do." Another man speaks 
not to the crowd, but to some little group of 

210 



THE SIXTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 211 

thoughtful-looking people who he knows will sym- 
pathize with him. " Who is this ? " they say; and 
he replies, " The Truth-teacher"; and he goes on 
to tell, not of the miracles, but of some strange, 
profound words that the Lord once spoke. " Let 
us follow Him; He is going to the temple; perhaps 
we shall hear something more." Another group 
would answer the question only to their own hearts, 
or at least only to some one most trusted friend. 
For them the wonder of His miracles, even the rich- 
ness of His truth, were nothing to the subtle influ- 
ence of love with which He had entered in and 
turned them into something like Himself, given 
them His courage and unselfishness and peaceful- 
ness and patience and joy. Their answer was, 
" The Heart-changer, the Maker of new life in men. 
Let us follow Him that we may be near Him; to be 
near Him is to really live." 

The Wonder-worker, the Truth-teller, the Heart- 
changer! — I know full well which it was that the 
Saviour Himself most longed to be to men. " The 
works that I do, they bear witness of Me," He 
declared ; " He that hath ears to hear, let him 
hear," He cried; but what a deep pathos came into 
His voice when He pleaded, " Ye will not come to 
Me that ye might have life! " He loved to do His 



212 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

work; He loved to speak His truth; but when a 
heart opened itself to Him and let Him be its Life, 
then His joy was full; that was what He had come 
for, that was Ili^ Father's work. 

Dear friends, as our souls stand waiting for their 
Deliverer, what is He whom we expect ? As we 
hear the sound of His coming in all this movement 
of Christian life about us, Who is He that comes? 
A Wonder-worker to bring us forgiveness ? A 
Truth-teacher to open Heaven ? Yes; but He is 
more than that if we will let Him be. He must be 
more than that if He is really to save us. He 
comes with Love which, when He puts it into us, 
is Life. He comes with His eternal heart of pity 
which, when He gives it to us, becomes our new 
heart of trust. He brings us not only His Power, 
not only His Wisdom, He brings us Himself, and 
He says: " He that believeth in Me, though He 
were dead yet shall he live." 

On this Palm Sunday, I wish that some of us 
could hear the footsteps of the coming Christ. 
Slowly, quietly, He is approaching. Now hidden 
and now shown by the winding road, He is pressing 
more and more closely on us. Around us men are 
questioning about Him; they are asking, " Who is 
He ? " Let us have our answer at least ready: 



THE SIXTH SUNDAY IN LENT. 213 

He is my Saviour. To know Him has been a new- 
life to me. It has been salvation. Henceforth not 
I live, but He liveth in me; and where He leads me 
I will go, what He makes me 1 will be, now and 
forever. 

Light above light and Bliss above bliss, 
Whom words cannot utter, lo ! Who is This ? 
As a king with many crowns He stands, 
And our names are graven on His hands ; 
As a Priest, with God-uplifted eyes, 
He offers for us His sacrifice ; 
As the Lamb of God for sinners slain, 
That we too may live He lives again. 

Who art Thou, O Lord Jesus Christ ? Thou didst become Man ; 
as the First-born of every creature I worship Thee. 

Thou art the Word, God and with God ; as the Divine Word I 
worship Thee. 

Thou art the Way by which alone man cometh to the Father ; a 
wayfarer liable to error and beseeching safeguard, I worship Thee. 

Thou art the Truth, in Whom mercy and truth are met together ; 
in the paths of Thy mercy and Thy truth I worship Thee. 

Thou art the Life, who hadst power to lay down Thy life for us 
and take it again ; as the Life of life I worship Thee. 

O Thou Who hearest prayer, and to Whom all flesh shall come, 
grant me grace to know and worship Thee, now and forever. Amen. 



flbotlbat! in 1bol\> MccYu 

And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, 
Baying, Hosanna to the Son of David ; Blessed is He that cometh in 

the mime t>f the Lord. — Matt., xxi., 9, 

It was Christ's day of triumph. He whom the 
people had so often turned away from, was now 
surrounded by them ; their shouts were ringing in 
His ears, and lie was riding over the branches and 
the clothes with which they had strewn His path. 
He had been humiliated and restrained. No recog- 
nition of the kingliness that was in Him had broken 
the long, heavy months of contempt and persecu- 
tion. Only a few disciples and a little company of 
women had caught sight of what He really was. 
But now at last the darkness had broken into light, 
the silence had opened into utterance. He knew 
that it belonged to Him; with calm, serene author- 
ity He took it for His own. Each cry of " Hosan- 
na " that rose about Him met in His conscious- 
ness the certain knowledge that He was indeed a 
King. . . . 



MONDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 21 5 

An hour later Christ, with his shouting escort, 
entered into Jerusalem, and " He went into the 
temple, and began to cast out them that sold there- 
in, and them that bought; saying unto them, It is 
written, My house is the house of prayer, but ye 
have made it a den of thieves." The traders of the 
temple fled more easily because it was the people's 
Hero of the moment who appeared with the whip in 
His hand, and indignation burning in His face. So 
Jesus used His triumph, His greatness, to purify the 
desecrated temple. There was the consecration of 
unselfishness. Not for Himself was He glad to be 
acknowledged, but because He could so reclaim the 
insulted dignity of God. 

Now put that beside the ordinary uses which men 
make of power. Only think what it would be if 
every man to whom came privilege or exaltation 
turned it to that employment. How the privilege 
itself would be sanctified, and how the desecrated 
places of our life would be made holy, if every man 
in whom men saw genius, before whose feet they 
scattered their applause, whom they escorted with 
their shouts wherever he chose to go, should always 
choose to go straight to some temple which belonged 
to God, but which men were profaning with their 
wickedness, and with the fire of his genius sweep it 



2l6 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

clean ; if every man who towered above men with 
his colossal wealth used that almost despotic influ- 
ence which wealth gives to glorify integrity and to 
teach charity ; if every man in high office consecrated 
his power to defy and stigmatize corruption ; if 
every popular man tried to make men follow him to 
better lives; if every woman powerful in social life 
used her position to make Society more pure; if 
every brilliant scholar tried to make literature more 
sincere and full of faith ! This is the only way in 
which powers become embalmed for ever. If Jesus 
had done nothing with I lis triumph, it would have 
died away with the withering of the palm branches 
and the fading out of the hosannas in the April air. 
But now the sound of the lashes is ringing still, and 
the world is purer for them. It is a terrible tempta- 
tion to let power go unused. But an unused power 
is lost. O prosperous, powerful, privileged people! 
in all your different ways be like the Lord, and seal 
and consecrate your privilege by using it for some 
glory of God. 

I must not seem to speak only to the few who are 
specially great and triumphant. The humblest and 
the poorest among you may hear and remember 
that, whenever any triumph comes to you, however 
small it be, any prosperity or any power, it is not 



MONDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 217 

wholly yours till you have used it ; and remember 
Christ showed you the true use of it, which is to 
glorify God, to stand up for righteousness in some 
little spot, to make the world more pure. 

When one sees the effect of prosperity on men, it 
often seems as strange that God, who cares only 
for men's best spiritual good, should allow His chil- 
dren to prosper as that He should let them be crushed 
with misfortune. For prosperity is always doing for 
men just the opposite of what it did for Jesus, mak- 
ing them cowards and unfitting them for pain. " In 
all time of our prosperity," we may well pray, 
" Good Lord, deliver us." Deliver us not only 
from its mischiefs, but set us free for its true use. 
Make it do for us what it did for Thee. Give us the 
grace to grow by every privilege more strong for 
God's glory and honor, more pitiful of brother 
men, and more ready for the change when the day 
darkens and panic comes where peace is now. 

We Christians are continually dwelling upon the 
sufferings of Jesus, and it is good that we should do 
so. He was preeminently and peculiarly the Saviour 
by suffering. It is as the Man of Sorrows, the Man 
acquainted with grief, that He has always made His 
great appeal to the heart of man. But to-day we 
have been led to look upon the other side, and think 



2l8 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

how exalted and how great He was. Behold! when 
we do that, we do not, as we might well fear to do, 
lose sight and hold of that helpfulness and strength 
in Christ which has been most associated with, most 
revealed to us through, His humiliation. As He is 

exalted lie only shows to us in new lights His pity 
and faithfulness. Here is great reassurance for the 
Christian. Here is a truth which many Christians 
need. It sometimes seems as if the loftier views of 
Christ's nature, those which most crowned Him 
with the glory of the Godhead, might — perhaps 
must — separate His life from ours. Jesus, the 
brother man, the sharer in my wants and infirmities, 
I can take hold of Him. He does pity me. But 
Christ, the Son of God, One with the Father, He is 
too far away. Can lie pity a poor, insignificant 
creature like me ? Is he anxious for and busy with 
the destinies of earth ? Have we not lost Him from 
the earth when we have set Him in the heavens ? 

But never be afraid of that ! The souls that have 
set Christ highest have always found Him dearest. 
The more you understand how far He is above you, 
the more you will know how near He is to you. 
Exalt your Saviour then! Crown Him with many 
crowns. Magnify the depth of that nature, the 
mystery of that work by which you are redeemed. 



MONDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 210, 

You will not lose your Saviour so ; rather He shall 
come as He came on that day of His exaltation to 
the heart and conscience of Jerusalem, with new 
love and power to your heart and conscience. 
Whether triumphing or suffering, whether on Olivet 
or Calvary, He is always the same Christ; always 
full of love, and always strong in judgment. Let us 
open our gates to Him to-day. Come in, O Christ, 
and judge us! Come, and we will cast out, — nay, 
come and cast out for us every sin that hinders 
Thee ! Come, purge our souls by Thy presence as 
Thou didst of old purge the temple! Come, be our 
King for ever! " Blessed is he that cometh in the 
Name of the Lord." 

In Thee all fulness dwelleth, 

All grace and power divine ; 
The glory that excelleth, 

O Son of God, is Thine : 
We worship Thee, we praise Thee, 

To Thee alone we sing ; 
We praise Thee and confess Thee 

Our glorious Lord and King ! 

I beseech Thee, Lord Jesus, to enter the temple of my heart, and 
to purge out and drive far away from me whatever Thou shalt see 
there polluted or profane. Preserve me from evil and strengthen me 
in all goodness, that I may enter with Thee into the everlasting 
habitations of the heavenly Jerusalem. Amen. 



Gues&a? in Ibolp Week. 

The sun was darkened. — Likl, xxiii., 45. 

The earth did quake, and the rocks rent. — Mail, xxvii., 51. 

Science is teaching us to-day about the vitality 
of the universe. Everything which we call dead is 
quivering with life, the stones under our feet as well 

as the stars over our heads. The beasts and hills, 
the streams and fields, are all alive; all are instinct 
with the vitality of God. What then ? As the best 
truths which science teaches are always making way 
for the higher truths of religion and the spiritual life, 
shall not this truth of the life of the dead world pre- 
pare us for the story of the Crucifixion ? If all is 
alive, and all life is one, and Christ's is the most 
perfect life that the world ever saw, is it then strange 
that the awful experience of that perfect, central 
Life should be felt in terror and disturbance and 
perplexed hope through all the structure of the 
globe ? Shall He who is The Life shudder and fall 
in death, and the great robes of the lesser life, which 
are the garment that He wears, not sway and trem- 
ble with the agitation ? 



TUESDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 221 

This is the meaning of the darkness and the earth- 
quake — what shall they mean to us ? 

First, they must lend their emphasis to the infi- 
nite, mysterious importance of the Tragedy. If it 
ever lose its greatness in our eyes, if the things 
immediately about us ever shut it out of our sight, 
let the tribute of nature, the awe of the darkened 
sky and the terror of the bursting rocks, recall to 
us the greatness, the fearfulness, the power of the 
death of Christ. But, besides that, let it teach us 
always of the liveness of the earth. It is no dead, 
burnt-out cinder on whose breast we live. It is a 
live earth, registering in its vital changes all that 
men do, sympathetic, tremulous with vitality, a 
world to honor and to reverence and to love, not to 
despise nor to disgrace, an earth for noble men to 
live noble lives upon, an earth which, being itself 
full of the lower inspirations of the life of God, must 
have true help to give to all those higher inspirations 
of His life which are in man. What can we say 
more than St. Paul has said — a creation groaning 
and travailing, waiting for the manifestation of the 
sons of God ? . 

There is another incident which is recorded only 
by St. Matthew. He declares that, when Jesus 
died, " Many bodies of saints which had slept arose 



222 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

and came out of the graves, after His resurrection, 
and appeared unto many." The story is told in 
connection with Christ's death, though it is not till 
after I lis resurrection that the wonder is said to 
have occurred. 

To us, at least, it is the spiritual meaning of the 
event that is of chief value. To the disciples there 
may have been other uses in it which we do not 
know. To us it offers a picture of the way in 
which the death of Christ — the supreme self-offering 
of Man to God — reached out and claimed for itself 
and filled with life and unity all the devotion and 
piety and earnest struggle after goodness which was 
or ever had been anywhere upon the earth in all the 
hi>t<»ry of man. 

Life given to good efforts of human nature that 
seemed dead, and unity given to solitary efforts of 
human nature that seemed hopelessly estranged — is 
not that the meaning of this one of the events of the 
Crucifixion ? Sometimes the absorbing interest and 
value of the death of Christ has seemed to make 
worthless the good works of men who lived outside 
of its immediate and conscious influence — is not its 
proper and legitimate power just the reverse ? 
Does it not claim in its true quality, and unite with 
every other righteous deed of man, the darkest and 



TUESDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 223 

slightest and remotest of all the struggles of the 
human soul to obey God ? Stand by the Cross, 
and catch its spirit, and the saints which sleep shall 
rise and come to you, — not merely your own dear 
dead, not merely those whom you have known 
to be true servants of the Lord according to their 
light, but all who, anywhere, in any age, have tried 
to do right and not wrong, to do good and not evil, 
and to find God. They shall all arise and come; 
they shall appear to you ; they shall speak to you 
and tell you of the pains and joys of their struggle; 
and, knowing at last in Christ the Source of all their 
hitherto unknown strength, they shall bid you 
believe in Him and be strong. 

Behold, then, the centralness of the Cross ! There 
is no need of man which the Cross, thoroughly 
known and believed in, cannot abundantly supply. 

It will do its work for the world as the world shall 
become ready for it. Not yet! Not all at once, 
but slowly, steadily, the Cross and all it means — 
God's Love made manifest in and to obedient man 
— slowly, steadily, it shall occupy the world and 
prove itself the master-power of human life. 

But it may become the master-power of our lives 
now. For us the rocks may move, and the dead 
awake to life, and God be infinitely near instead of 



224 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

so terribly far away. We may talk with the Saints 
of all ages, and feed our faith from theirs. Into our 
souls may come the power of the Crucified, making 
us know that Jesus is the Son of God. 

When ? 

Now : 

O dying Christ ! wilt Thou not fill us with Thy 
life! Wilt Thou not make us know that to try to 
live outside the power of Thy death is death indeed ! 

Behold, we try to give ourselves to Thee! Wilt 
Thou not take us entirely — entirely — and make us 
henceforth to be not our own, but Thine who didst 
die for us ! 

Inmost heaven its radiance pours 
Round thy windows, at thy doors, 
Asking but to be let in, 
Waiting to flood out thy sin, 
Offering thee unfailing health, 
Love's refreshment, boundless wealth ; 
Voices at thy life's gate say, 
" Be immortal, Soul, To-day ! " 

Blessed Lord Jesus, Who earnest to destroy the works of the devil, 
and to make us heirs of everlasting life, grant us grace to live so 
near to Thee every day in the path of duty that we may begin the 
Heavenly life here, which shall be ours for ever hereafter. Amen. 



THUebnesfcap in 1bolp Weefc, 

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the earth 
until the ninth hour. — Matt., xxvii., 45. 

We can imagine that a joy came to the heart of 
Jesus when the darkness fell upon the earth. No 
longer did the blank, unsympathetic landscape stare 
Him in the face. His soul delighted and was 
soothed when the darkened world entered into His 
struggle. And so there is, I am sure, with all His 
wish to see us happy, a satisfaction in the heart of 
Christ when any soul, out of its first careless, easy 
indifference about Him and His suffering, passes 
into the darkness. He rejoices in its temporary 
eclipse because He knows that it promises a brighter 
and more permanent spiritual light to come. He is 
glad for you, if your troubled soul is really feeling 
the darkness of the Cross, because He means to 
lead you through the Cross's darkness to the Cross's 
light. . . . 

The Shame of Sin and the Bewilderment of 

15 225 



226 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

Struggle — those are the elements that make the 
darkness which falls upon a human soul when it is 
really taken possession of by the Cross of Christ. It 
is like the darkness that was over all the earth from 
the sixth hour to the ninth hour. The earth knew 
that that darkness was no ordinary night. 
It was the sign of a terrible woe, and yet it was the 
token of a glorious promise. The common nights 
seemed commonplace beside this noonday darkness. 
.And so your heart has known many darknesses. 
You have been discouraged and disappointed and 
depressed very often. You have been frightened at 
the immensity of life; you have been wearied with 
the littleness of life. You have been haunted by 
persecutions, saddened by ingratitude, vexed by 
misconception, and angered because men would not 
honor you as you deserved. All those darknesses 
have come to you. They have come and gone. 
1 hey have been to you like the night which you 
knew would pass away and leave you as it found 
you. But when you come into the power of the 
death of Christ, you feel the difference and the new- 
ness. That is a darkness which will not leave you 
as it found you. From it you cannot go out just as 
you went in. In it you must be regenerated and 
made a new man. It is all alive with power and 



WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 227 

hope ; for, at the heart of all its shame for sin 
there is the soul's undestroyed and indestructible 
value, and in the midst of its bewilderment of 
struggle there is an inextinguishable hope of suc- 
cess. The ordinary depressions and discourage- 
ments of life are forever different from that darkness 
in whose centre, at whose heart, hangs Christ on 
His cross. They are full of weakness. He throbs 
out strength — His own strength — through all the 
darkness which He pours around the soul. 

Who does not know that there is a shame which 
makes weak, and there is a shame which makes 
strong ? There is a shame with which the detected 
robber skulks away out of the sight of men ; there is 
a shame with which the soldier, whose captain rush- 
ing into his deserted place has shown him his cow- 
ardice, rushes forward in his turn and sets his heroic 
heart between his captain and the foe. And so 
there is a bewilderment which turns to palsy, and 
there is another bewilderment which turns to faith. 
The shame that begets heroism and the bewilder- 
ment that turns to faith are the shame and bewilder- 
ment that issue forth from the cross of Christ. The 
darkness at whose heart He hangs, crucified for us, 
is the darkness that has in it the promise — nay, the 
certainty — of light. 



22S THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

That darkness is around you now. You are 
ashamed of your sin in the presence of the great 
Sacrifice for sin. You arc in the thick of the strug- 
gle to do, not your own will but the will of God to 
whom Christ gave you in His sacrifice for all man- 
kind. It would be useless to tell you that all is 
bright with you. It would be useless to deny that 
life is in some sense darker, more serious, more 
critical, more full of terrible issues and deeper fears, 
than it used to be before you felt the power of the 
Cross. What shall I say then ? May I not say 
this ? — be thankful for the darkness into which you 
have been led. If the way to the light that never 
shall go out must lie through darkness, be thankful 
for the darkness. Be thankful that the brightness 
of pride and carelessness have given place to the 
darkness of shame and struggle. Pray to God, first 
of all, that you may never go back into the pride 
where you were not ashamed of sinning, and the 
carelessness where you did not even try to sacrifice 
your will to God's. 

And yet be sure that darkness is not the End, 
that beyond it lies light, that to bring you out into 
light is the purpose for which alone God brings you, 
or permits you to be brought into darkness : 



WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 22Q 

Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be 
partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light ; 

Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath trans- 
lated us into the kingdom of His dear Son, 

In Whom we have redemption through His blood, even the for- 
giveness of sins. 

O God of hope, the true Light of faithful souls, and perfect Bright- 
ness of the blessed, Who art verily the Light of Thy Church, grant 
that my heart may both render Thee a worthy prayer, and always 
glorify Thee with the offering of praises : Through Jesus Christ our 
Lord. Amen. 



Gburs&ap in 1bol£ Wcefe. 

I am the living Bread which came down from heaven : if any man 
eat of this bread he shall live fur ever: and the bread that I will give 
is My flesh, which I will i;ive for the life of the world. 

The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying : How can 
this man give as his flesh to eat ? — John, vi., 51, 52. 

NOTICE how Christ answers this doubting ques- 
tion : " Except ye cdt the flesh of the Son of Man, 
and drink His blood, ye have no life in you." 
What does it mean but this — that you cannot know 
how it is done except by doing it ? It may seem 
strange, but it is no new law. It is a law which 
runs through all life in application to the highest 
things. I cannot tell you how to meet sorrow; you 
must do it. So only can you learn how to do it. 

How can I," cries the poor, bereaved heart, sit- 
ting in the darkened room alone, " How can I live 
my dreary life alone ?" " Go on and live it," is 
the answer. And as he goes on it is not dreary, 
and he can live it bravely in Christ's strength. 

"How can I eat His flesh ?" " Except you do you 
230 



THURSDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 23 I 

have no life." It seems hard and unreasonable, this 
inexorable demand for the unintelligible and impos- 
sible; but it is only the principle of all experimental 
truth ; that in no other way than by experience can 
it be learned. It seems to involve a contradiction, 
but yet it is the method of much of the very best 
progress that we make and we all act upon it con- 
stantly : 

" You must love Him, ere to you 
He shall seem worthy of your love." 

The general spirit of the figure is clear ; it means 
support or strength. That is the idea of food. 
Only, food means a certain kind of strength; it is 
strength in a man, not strength without a man. It 
is strength incorporated, and not strength applied. 
To feed on Christ, then, is to get His 
strength into us to be our strength. You feed on 
the cornfield, and the strength of the cornfield 
comes into you and is your strength. You feed on 
the cornfield and then go and build your house, 
and it is the cornfield in your strong arm that builds 
the house, that cuts down the trees, and piles the 
stone, and lifts the roof into its place. You feed on 
Christ and then go and live your life, and it is Christ 
in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that 



2$2 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins 
the crown. 

But what is this strength of Christ that comes into 
us ? There can be but one answer. It is His char- 
acter. It is the moral qualities of I lis nature that 
are to enter into us and be ours until we are His. 
This is His strength — His purity, His truth, His 
mercifulness, — in one word, His holiness, the per- 
fectness of I lis moral life. . . . This is the 
strength of which we eat, and which, like true food, 
enters into us and becomes truly ours while it is still 
His. 

And this brings us to the understanding of that 
word " flesh." We are to cat His flesh. Now, 
the flesh was the expression of the human life of 
Jesus. It was in His incarnation that He became 
capable of uttering those qualities in which man 
might be like Him, which men might receive from 
Him and take into themselves. Think of it. God 
had stood before men from the first, and they had 
looked with awe and adoration upon Him, throned 
far above them. . . . What was there in the 
Deity that could repeat itself in man ? Not His 
majesty, not omnipotence and omniscience, surely. 
Then came the Incarnation. Here was 
God in the flesh. Solemnly that of the Divine 



THURSDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 233 

which was capable of being wrapped in and of living 
through the human, was brought close within that 
wondrous life lived in a human body. There was 
the God we were to imitate, to grow like to, to take 
into ourselves until He filled us with Himself. It 
was the incarnate God ; it was the God in the flesh 
that was to enter into man. This was the flesh 
which we were to eat, and by which we were to 
live. . . . 

This giving of His own flesh for our food is always 
spoken of in connection with the great Sacrifice of 
the flesh in which He gave it for us. There is 
always this association between the reception of the 
strength of the incarnate Christ and His crucifixion, 
in which He gave Himself up that He might furnish 
that strength to His people forever. The great 
Christian Sacrament, which embodies this idea — the 
idea of the feeding of the soul upon the flesh of 
Christ — is all filled full of the memories of the agony 
in which the flesh was offered. What does this 
mean ? Does it not mean this, — that however man 
longs for His God, however man sees that in the 
incarnate Christ there is the God he needs and whom 
his nature was meant to receive, it is only when man 
sees that Divine Being suffering for him, only when 
he stands beside the Cross and beholds the love in 



234 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

the agony, that his hungry nature is able to take 
the food it needs, that is so freely offered ? The 
flesh must be broken before we can take it. This is 
what Christ says; and the history of thousands of 
souls has borne its witness to it, that it is the suffer- 
ing Saviour, the Saviour in His suffering; that saves 
the soul. The suffering Saviour, inly known, and 
through His wounds letting out His life into the 
starved lives of them who hold Him fast — that is 
the Gospel. 

Before His cross the lesson must be learned. 
Stand there until you are grateful through and 
through for such a love so marvellously shown. Let 
gratitude open your life to receive His Spirit ; let it 
make you long to be like Him ; let love bring Him 
into you so that you shall do His will because you 
have His heart. That entrance of His life into 
yours shall give you strength and nourishment such 
as you never knew before. Then you shall know, in 
growing, dependent, delighted strength, more and 
more every day, the answer to the old ever new 
question, " How can this man give us His flesh to 
eat?" 

How can He ? Certainly He can and will if you 
will go to Him, and pray to Him, and love Him, and 
obey Him, and receive Him. And what a strength 



THURSDAY IN HOLY WEEK. 235 

comes of that holy feeding ! Where is the task that 
terrifies the man who lives by Christ ? Where is the 
discouragement over which he will not walk, to go 
to the right which he must reach? You may starve 
him, but he has this inner food. You may darken 
his life, but he has this inner light. You may make 
war about him, but he has this peace within. You 
may turn the world into a hell, but he carries this 
inner heaven safely through its fiercest fires. He is 
like Christ Himself ; he has meat to eat that we know 
not of, and in the strength of it he overcomes at last, 
and is conqueror through his Lord. 

It is possible, and may God make it real for all of 
us! 

O Corn of Wheat, which God for us did sow 
In the rough furrows of this world of woe, 
That Thou the Bread of Life for us might be, 
To nourish us to all eternity ; 
Grant us, through faith, O Christ, to feed on Thee ! 

O true and living Vine ! 
Bending so low from heaven in Thine endeavor 

To give us all of Thine immortal Wine, 
That we may live for ever, 
Grant us, through faith, O Christ, to drink of Thee ! 

Lord, evermore give us this Bread ; give us Thyself. Thou who in 
love givest Thyself to us in the Blessed Sacrament of Thy Body and 
Blood, grant us grace in love to receive Thee, in love to retain Thee, 
in love to be joined to Thee eternally. Amen. 



Pilatesaith unto them. Shall I crucify your King? — JOHN, xix., 15. 

The shame and the exaltation ! The exaltation 
and the shame! These two words describe the 
power which the sight of the crucifixion of its King 
must have on human nature. Just put it in the 
simplest way to yourself; — here are you, a man, liv- 
ing your human life in careless, comfortable selfish- 
ness, and to you Good Friday comes. What does it 
mean ? Once into the centre of this same humanity 
came its true King, — the Man in whom humanity was 
perfect, perfect humanity because filled with divinity. 
And lo ! humanity was such that its King could not 
live in its midst without suffering and dying. " Shall 
I crucify your King? " asked the Power of Evil, and 
no remonstrance came from the condition of human- 
ity. He had to die ! And if He were here by your 
side to-day, must He not suffer still ? Must not still 
the ideal of what you were made to be, be tortured 
by the reality of what you are ? There is the way 
236 



GOOD FRIDAY. 237 

in which you crucify the Son of God afresh. There 
is the power, the blessed power of overwhelming 
shame ! And yet, behold again ! He is willing to 
be crucified ! That too is manifest on Good Friday. 
It is terrible to need the sacrifice of such a King: it 
is glorious to have a King who will make such a 
sacrifice. There is the exaltation. 

In more than one old heathen story it is the sacri- 
fice of the King of the country that saves the sinful 
and plague-stricken country from its curse. The 
people stand and see their King go quietly forth, 
alone, majestic, sorrowful ; never so thoroughly their 
King as when he thus goes to death for them. And 
as they stand and look their hearts are full of these 
two powers — exaltation and shame ; — exaltation that 
they have a King who is willing and able to save 
them by his dying, shame that they are such that it 
is only by his dying that he can give them salvation. 

So must we see our King go to His death. Oh, 
never does human nature seem so glorious and so 
wicked all at once as when we stand before the 
cross of Jesus ! The most enthusiastic hopes, the 
most profound humiliation, have found their inspira- 
tion there. Down at its foot have bowed and wept 
the penitents who seemed to have reached the low- 
est depths of self-contempt and misery ; out from 



238 THE MOKE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

beneath its arms have ridden forth the knights of 
hope and courage for the celestial conquest of the 
world. The glory and disgrace of our humanity 
both culminate on Calvary ; for there the Son of 
Man in agony and death gave Himself in conse- 
crated sacrifice for the sins of men. 

Oh, let us take the disgrace, my friends, but let us 
not fail to take the glory too! If I have my share 
in the sin for which my King was crucified, I have 
my true share also in the offering of this Humanity, 
which is both mine and II is, which He made there. 
As He entered into my sin, so may I enter into His 
sacrifice. He was offered up there for me because 
I am a sinner, but I was offered up there in Him 
because He is my King. Let me not forget that 
last! The life which I live now is an offered life; 
long, long ago, it was presented to God and Holi- 
ness, the God of Holiness upon the cross. There- 
fore let me go among my temptations strong in His 
strength ; let me be pure, brave, and unselfish ; let 
me say to Sin, " I do not know you ; I died to you 
in my King's death." Let me say to Goodness, " I 
belong to thee, for I was given to thee in the giving 
of my King." Let me, in St. Paul's great phrase, 
"know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him cru- 
cified"; for to know Him and Him crucified is to 



GOOD FRIDAY. 239 

know the kingdom consecrated in the King. It is to 
know everything — the world, my brethren, myself, 
everything — to know them all as sacrificed, dedicated 
entirely to God ; it is to know myself and all the 
world as not our own, but His ! 

The Earth was faint with battle, and she lay 
With weary face and garments rolled in blood, 
An exile from the presence of her God, 
Through all the heat and burden of the day. 
And, " Oh, that one would bring to me," she said, 

" While I in anguish wait, 
Of the water from the Well of Paradise, 
Which is beside the gate ! " 

A mighty Man, full armed for the fight, 
Burst through the foemen with resistless might — 
Not heeding that the angel of the gate 
Did pierce Him sorely with his sword of light — 
And brought unto the Earth, 

What time the night fell late, 
Of the water from the Well of Paradise, 
Which is beside the gate. 

Meekly, with covered face and bended head, 
" He hath done matchless things for me," she said : 
" This water do I hold for this Man's blood ; 
I take the cup and drink — and live to God." 

O Loving Father, Who hast sent Thy Son Jesus Christ to die on 
the Cross for us, give us grace to see in that great offering Thy love 
for us, and to love Thee through Him by the power of the Holy 
Ghost, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Caster Even. 

And that He died for all, that they which live should not hence- 
forth live unto themselves, but unto Ilim which died for them and 
rose again. — 2 Cor., v. 15. 

Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in 
Whom we trust that He will yet deliver us. — 2 Cor., i., 10. 

HOW docs the death of Christ bring this new life? 
what is there in His sacrifice that sets men free from 
living to themselves, and makes them live to Him? 
I think we see it best if we look at those typical 
apostles. Certainly so it was with them. From the 
day of Christ's crucifixion any one who reads the 
story feels a change in them, and knows full well 
what is its nature. Before, they loved Him ; while 
He was alive, they followed Him ; now, their love 
has become their religion, and their following of Him 
is all their life. They are living unto Him. As down 
a hillside, with the broad sea lying at its foot, a mul- 
titude of streams run in their different channels, yet 
all run to the same end ; so these apostles' lives are 
very different, yet all lived unto Christ. 
240 



EASTER EVEN. 24 1 

Look at them, then, and you will see what it is in 
His death that is so powerful. Their Master's love 
and their Master's nature became absolutely clear to 
them there. ... It was what happens when any 
dear and rich life is taken away from you. At first, the 
only consciousness is of a shock and bitter pain, which 
is even precious to you because it is so bound up with 
your love for the departed. By-and-by the sharpest 
pain subsides ; perhaps you almost blame yourself 
for losing it, as if it were a sort of disloyalty ; but 
something better takes its place. You look back on 
that life as a completed thing ; you see the meaning 
of it; you are able to put its parts together and to 
put the whole in its place. The passionate storm of 
sorrow calms into the tranquil delight of thoughtful 
recollection. Your friend comes back to you, as it 
were, in your full appreciation of what he was and 
vivid certainty of what he is. . . . 

This must have been the way in which the dis- 
ciples looked back upon the death of Jesus, — never 
losing the sense of its sadness, but getting always a 
deeper knowledge of its infinite meaning. They had 
known much of each (their Master's love and their 
Master's nature) before, but now the veil seemed en- 
tirely withdrawn , and they saw both completely. They 
did not tell the story to themselves perhaps ; they 



242 THE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

were all stunned with grief and horror; very blindly 
it crept in and laid itself upon their intelligence. 
They went home and sat through all the dreary 
Sabbath, thinking perhaps that they had lost their 
Christ, not knowing that they had only just really 
found Him ; but when the sunlight of the Resurrec- 
tion came, it touched this new knowledge sleeping 
in their hearts, and in an instant ripened it to con- 
sciousness and action. " Behold, how He loved us ! " 
and " Behold what He is! " — these were the seeds 
that dropped into their natures in the awful furrows 
that the Crucifixion made. " Come, let us serve 
Him," and " Come, let us copy Him," — those were 
the plants of resolution that sprang up from the 
seeds in the rich warmth of the Resurrection. 

But He died not for those disciples only : 
He died for all, that all might live to Him. 
He died for us, that we might live to Him; that 
we may always have our faces set that way, al- 
ways be coming nearer to Him, always be serving 
Him with a profounder gratitude and imitating Him 
with a more implicit love, always be struggling tow- 
ards Him till at last we shall come to Him, and be 
with Him forever. That is what He died for. 
Watching that as it goes on in us, He shall see of 
the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. 



EASTER EVEN. 243 

Bring your finest linen and your spice. 

Swathe the sacred Dead ; 
Bind with careful hands and piteous eyes 

The napkin round His head : 

Lay Him in the garden-rock to rest : 

Rest you the Sabbath length : 
The Sun that went down crimson in the west 

Shall rise renewed in strength. 

God Almighty shall give joy for pain, 

Shall comfort him who grieves : 
Lo ! He with joy shall doubtless come again, 

And with Him bring His sheaves. 

O Christ, Saviour of the world, insomuch as I have profited by this 
Lenten season, bless me ; insomuch as I have failed to use it faith- 
fully, forgive me. 

Bless unto me this coming night of holy Easter ; that in it I may 
truly rise from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. 

Lord and Life-giver, come and breathe upon my soul ; Thou canst 
lift me out of the lowest pit. 

Perfect Thy strength in my weakness : and let Thy grace be sufficient 
for me. 

Since Thou hast not taken me away in the midst of my days but 
upholden my soul in life, suffer not my feet to slip. 

Grant me some work of Thy love to do ; and prosper it in my 
hands. 

Let me not die until I have fulfilled Thy will ; and let me enter 
with joy into rest. 

Neither pray I for myself alone, but for all whom Thou hast given 
me, or to whom my prayer may avail aught : 



244 TIIE MORE ABUNDANT LIFE. 

For all who fail to call upon Thee, and for whom no one pleads ; 
let Thy love be their intercessor : 

For all who are in any agony of anxiety, or in any distress of afflic- 
tion : 

For all who strive in any good work, to the glory of God and the 
help of men : 

For all whom I love or who love me, in whatever place or circum- 
stance : 

For all whom I have hurt, or tempted, or wronged, in thought, 
word, or deed : 

For all the souls whom I have loved, departed into Thy hand : 

Lift Thou up the Light of Thy countenance upon us all, O God ; 
and bless us with Thy continual peace. 

Grant us grace to say always to Thy perfect Will : Amen and 
Amen. 



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